Why does Route 53 give your hosted zone four seemingly random name servers instead of the same ones everyone else gets? There are 2,048 of them, arranged into 730 billion possible combinations. That’s what keeps another customer’s failure domain separate from yours.

Squirrels have shut down Nasdaq trading twice. Beavers, cows, and sharks have taken down networks too, but misconfiguration, sabotage, and copper theft cause far more damage than any animal ever has.

In 1986, a network slowdown forced Van Jacobson to invent TCP congestion control. Tahoe/Reno, CUBIC, and BBR mark three different eras of solving that problem.

A Bloom filter checks whether something belongs to a set without storing the set. Firefox’s CRLite used one to compress revocation data for nearly a billion certificates into 6.7 megabytes.

Your p99 latency might not be a percentile. Averaging percentiles across replicas produces a meaningless number, and t-digest is the sketch algorithm that fixes it at scale.

Why efficiency improvements in technology often increase total consumption rather than reduce it, and how leaders can anticipate and manage the inevitable rebound.

How John Boyd’s OODA Loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) applies to technology leadership, and practical strategies for eliminating the bottlenecks that slow your competitive cycles.

Southwest Airlines has grown while desperately trying to be scrappy, creative and humorous. The challenge is that scrappy doesn’t scale well.

Learn how you can move faster and focus on the things that matter by using incident analysis as your secret weapon. Operating at speed and at scale tests the capabilities of even the most experienced engineering teams. In this software world, it is inevitable that things will break. When they do, what do you do? Pick up the pieces and carry on? What if that’s not enough? Learning from incidents has taught us that broken things can lead to powerful opportunities, but only when we’re looking at them through the right lens.

Think about your team for a moment. How well is it functioning? Are you currently on a high-performing team, having found your groove and flow state as a group? Are you on a team that isn’t quite in that magical state of being yet, but it feels like you’re on your way? Are you feeling some friction—frustration, confusion—with your team? Or have you just joined a new team, so none of these apply yet?

Chaos Engineering builds confidence in distributed systems by deliberately introducing failures before they occur on their own. The discipline shifts teams from reactive incident response to proactive resilience building.

Team Topologies provides four fundamental team types – stream-aligned, platform, enabling, and complicated-subsystem – and three core team interaction modes – collaboration, X-as-a-Service, and facilitating. Together with awareness of Conway’s law, team cognitive load, and how to become a sensing organization, Team Topologies results in an effective and humanistic approach to building and running software systems.

We grumble that there just aren’t enough hours in the day and that someone else sure seems to have a lot of free time. But we regular mortals only have twenty-four hours in a day. The problem is that we don’t protect our hours from being stolen. We allow thieves to steal time from us, day after day after day. Who are these thieves of time?

Resilience Engineering is the framework for building systems that hold up when the unexpected is inevitable. Redundancy and rigorous testing still leave room for your system to fail anyway.

So how do we do remote work right? It takes much more than the half-hearted “you’re allowed to work from home” policy you see at companies nowadays. Remote-first means working remote is the default. It means making sure your remote employees are as much a part of the team as those in the office.

Concentrating decisions at the top discards the intelligence of people closest to the work. Marquet’s leader-leader model distributes authority to where information lives, producing organizations that outlast their leaders.

How do you avoid killing something too early, or celebrating too early. And last, how do you know when to kill a dud?

A just culture balances the need for an open and honest reporting environment with the end of a quality learning environment and culture. While the organization has a duty and responsibility to employees (and ultimately to patients), all employees are held responsible for the quality of their choices. Just culture requires a change in focus from errors and outcomes to system design and management of the behavioral choices of all employees.