4 ms·

Kind of a spicy opinion as a SRE, but if your disaster recovery strategy isn't part of your operational strategy then it's not actually a strategy. It's a moons

by oooyay 3y ago

Kind of a spicy opinion as a SRE, but if your disaster recovery strategy isn't part of your operational strategy then it's not actually a strategy. It's a moonshot in the face of failure.

kevincox 3y ago
That's a strategy. And depending on your downtime tolerance it may be an acceptable strategy. In this case it probably wasn't an appropriate strategy.
- hinkley 3y ago
  Sticking your face in front of a pit bull you’ve never met before is “a strategy”. If you’re going to use the word strategy this way it has no meaning, which kills the conversation and communication in general. I think you’re confusing strategy and behavior. Strategy is a plan to do better than default behavior.
  - kevincox 3y ago
    Sticking your face in front of a pit bull is a strategy for what? Writing up a plan for disaster recovery is a strategy for disaster recovery. The pros are that it is cheap and ticks the regulatory checkboxes. The downside is that it has a high probability of a high recovery time in the case of a disaster. My point is that there are different pros and cons to every strategy that you can pick. I also don't think that all strategies are better than "default behaviour" whatever that is.
    - hinkley 3y ago
      > Sticking your face in front of a pit bull is a strategy for what? For meeting dogs of course. The problem I have is that it seems like you agree with other people in this thread, but real world experience tells me that stating things this way is more fuel for the lazy and for anarchists than it is support for the SREs. Don’t let the idiots think for a moment they are entitled to use a word as heavy as strategy. It ends farcically. Writing it down doesn’t make it a strategy. Satire is also written down.
    - oooyay 3y ago
      I think I can help disambiguate a bit. "is not a strategy" is a bit of a tip of the hat to "hope is not a strategy", the full extrapolation of which means that a plan is not equivalent to strategy and an unexercised strategy is the definition of hope. An analog is when I was in the military we wore every level of MOP gear once a year to ensure that your gear functioned correctly and that you knew how to wear it. On a second day we would enter building filled with chemical irritant where you must dawn your mask, clear it, breath, and communicate. All of this is part of proving the plan which equivocates to strategy. We've not faced an imminent CBRN threat in decades, but we still do it because we maintain a strategy for dealing with it. In this case, if you have a plan for how to deal with too much heat or too little power but you don't actively put the systems that transfer the responsibility or get put under stress during these disaster events then you never actually know for certain that they'll work. Therefore, they are not strategies, just plans.
nyc_data_geek1 3y ago
In the business continuity/disaster recovery space we like to say, if you don't regularly test your DR plan, you don't really have one.
hinkley 3y ago
Moonshot is being generous. It’s two steps away from Apollo 13. Build a CO2 scrubber out of parts in this box. You have twelve hours until the crew suffocates and dies.

by oooyay 3y ago

Kind of a spicy opinion as a SRE, but if your disaster recovery strategy isn't part of your operational strategy then it's not actually a strategy. It's a moonshot in the face of failure.

kevincox 3y ago

That's a strategy. And depending on your downtime tolerance it may be an acceptable strategy. In this case it probably wasn't an appropriate strategy.

hinkley 3y ago
Sticking your face in front of a pit bull you’ve never met before is “a strategy”. If you’re going to use the word strategy this way it has no meaning, which kills the conversation and communication in general. I think you’re confusing strategy and behavior. Strategy is a plan to do better than default behavior.
- kevincox 3y ago
  Sticking your face in front of a pit bull is a strategy for what? Writing up a plan for disaster recovery is a strategy for disaster recovery. The pros are that it is cheap and ticks the regulatory checkboxes. The downside is that it has a high probability of a high recovery time in the case of a disaster. My point is that there are different pros and cons to every strategy that you can pick. I also don't think that all strategies are better than "default behaviour" whatever that is.
  - hinkley 3y ago
    > Sticking your face in front of a pit bull is a strategy for what? For meeting dogs of course. The problem I have is that it seems like you agree with other people in this thread, but real world experience tells me that stating things this way is more fuel for the lazy and for anarchists than it is support for the SREs. Don’t let the idiots think for a moment they are entitled to use a word as heavy as strategy. It ends farcically. Writing it down doesn’t make it a strategy. Satire is also written down.
  - oooyay 3y ago
    I think I can help disambiguate a bit. "is not a strategy" is a bit of a tip of the hat to "hope is not a strategy", the full extrapolation of which means that a plan is not equivalent to strategy and an unexercised strategy is the definition of hope. An analog is when I was in the military we wore every level of MOP gear once a year to ensure that your gear functioned correctly and that you knew how to wear it. On a second day we would enter building filled with chemical irritant where you must dawn your mask, clear it, breath, and communicate. All of this is part of proving the plan which equivocates to strategy. We've not faced an imminent CBRN threat in decades, but we still do it because we maintain a strategy for dealing with it. In this case, if you have a plan for how to deal with too much heat or too little power but you don't actively put the systems that transfer the responsibility or get put under stress during these disaster events then you never actually know for certain that they'll work. Therefore, they are not strategies, just plans.

nyc_data_geek1 3y ago

In the business continuity/disaster recovery space we like to say, if you don't regularly test your DR plan, you don't really have one.

hinkley 3y ago

Moonshot is being generous. It’s two steps away from Apollo 13. Build a CO2 scrubber out of parts in this box. You have twelve hours until the crew suffocates and dies.