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Initially reading your response I was going to argue no way in hell there are that many coincidences in a short period of time. But the argument isn't about co
by davismwfl 7y ago
Initially reading your response I was going to argue no way in hell there are that many coincidences in a short period of time. But the argument isn't about coincidences, it is a cause and effect argument, which does make sense to me. Whether it is slack or just internet accessibility for someone and they decide to take off that day so they miss a log entry that normally would've been caught and fixed immediately. Or pagerduty failed and didn't notify a few teams about things that normally wouldn't cause downtime because people would be responding quickly to them. Totally make sense to me thinking of it that way.
I am super curious to read any after action reports that get published on these failures though. I always love learning even if I don't have a relevant situation.
- vikramkr 7y agoIt's also about coincidence, because the question isn't necessarily if it's likely to happen this week, but if its likely to happen in general, and I think it is, and if there is a single causal link anywhere that could make the odds really high.
- davismwfl 7y agoIsn't what you just said exactly the opposite of coincidence? A coincidence is two or more separate events that happen without an apparent or predictable causal link. So the fact the odds are high that this type of situation could occur (which I agree with) means it is predictable and has an apparent causal link with an associated probability. e.g. team A doesn't get notifications so they can't fix a server issue is a pretty high prediction of a future failure for that team. So it is cause and effect, with the associated probability. A coincidence would be you and I have the same birthday, we can associate a probability to that but there is no apparent causal link for why we would have the same birthday.