"The Upside of Downtime: How to Turn a Disaster Into an Opportunity"
summary
Downtime is inevitable but becomes an advantage when treated as communications first and engineering second: build an externally hosted public health dashboard, commit to a mean time to communicate SLA and push a human, timestamped postmortem within a week. Examples: Amazon/Salesforce-style dashboards, Google App Engine’s 3‑hour outage with minute‑by‑minute updates and a detailed postmortem that led to datastore changes, Facebook’s 13‑hour silence that harmed trust, and a Twitter‑watch tool (labs.whatmetrics.com) that detects outages in real time.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Start
- 1:53Downtime = Bad! (Duh)
- 7:54Recap
- 8:25Approach #2 Prepare for downtime
- 9:55Google App Engine
- 11:59Atlassian
- 14:49How To: Prepare for Downtime
- 25:28Be authentic
- 25:41Accept responsibility
- 25:53Trust
- 26:25Disclaimer: Don't screw up too often
- 29:43Change != Easy
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