Knowledge Glaciers in the Age of Automation and Cloud Native
summary
Claim: automation, cloud commoditization, and orchestration are actively eroding decades of institutional know‑how that once required months of hands‑on exploration. Evidence includes the shift to as-a-Service and container platforms like Kubernetes, consolidation of infrastructure knowledge into providers, and a concrete failure mode where opaque automation around flight control contributes to crashes that kill 346 people. Practical fixes: rebuild documentation, inner‑source institutional memory, and train engineers on the pre-automation stack.
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chapters (21)
- 0:00Introduction
- 3:54Apologies
- 4:55What are knowledge glaciers
- 5:07Knowledge compression
- 5:53Expected productivity and velocity
- 10:23Two main points
- 10:47Consolidation and automation
- 10:57We cannot be informed
- 12:42We can destroy lives
- 13:24We need to pay attention
- 14:33Climate change
- 19:14ECommerce
- 21:08Utility Computing
- 22:34What is the Cost
- 24:14Balancing Velocity with Knowledge
- 27:13Recap
- 28:33Questions
- 31:52Documentation Library
- 33:26Security Documentation
- 34:59Computer History
- 36:42Community Standards
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