Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Suggested Reading
For many years DiRT and related practices were company secrets. However, in
2012 a number of companies and practitioners revealed their disaster testing pro-
cedures in a series of articles that were curated by Tom and published in
ACM
Queue
magazine:
• “Resilience Engineering: Learning to Embrace Failure” is a group interview
Tom conducted with Kripa Krishnan, the coordinator of Google's DiRT pro-
gram; Jesse Robbins, the architect of Game Day at Amazon; and John Alls-
paw, senior vice president of technological operations at Etsy (
Robbins et al.
• Krishnan details Google's DiRT program in “Weathering the Unexpected”
(
Krishnan 2012
)
.
• Allspaw explained the theory and practice of Etsy's program in “Fault Injec-
tion in Production” (
Allspaw 2012b
)
.
• Tseitlin details the Netflix Simian Army and explains how it has improved re-
silience and maximized availability in “The Antifragile Organization” (
Tseitlin
Later Steven Levy was allowed to observe Google's annual DiRT process first-
hand for an article he wrote for
Wired
magazine titled “Google Throws Open
After the 2012 U.S. presidential election, an article in
The Atlantic
magazine,
“When the Nerds Go Marching in,” described the Game Day exercises conducted
by the Obama for America campaign in preparation for election day 2012 (
Mad-
rigal 2012
). Dylan Richard's talk “Gamedays on the Obama Campaign” provided
a first-hand account and the disclaimer that technology didn't win the election, but
it certainly could have lost it (
Richard 2013
)
.
15.4.4 Experiencing a DiRT Test
What follows is a fictionalized account of a Google DiRT exercise as seen from the per-
spective of the engineers involved in the test. The names, locations, and situations have
been changed. This description is adapted from an article Tom wrote for
ACM Queue
magazinetitled“GoogleDiRT:TheViewfromSomeoneBeingTested”(
Limoncelli2012
).
[Phone rings]
Tom: Hello?
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