Microsoft recently experienced a significant interruption of their Azure cloud service. Since a decent amount of data was available for this incident, I decided to do a partial root cause analysis. All of my source data came from Microsoft's official Azure blog post on 2014-Nov-24.
Tag Archives: technology
Software as Root Cause
Wired News has a nice article on what they consider to be the 10 worst software bugs of all time (so far). I knew about a few of these, notably the Therac-25 fatalities and the Ariane-5 self-destruction. However, at least three of them were new to me.
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Patterns of Response
Problems happen all the time. How we respond ought to be a function of the problem's importance... but how do we decide what is important? More importantly, how do we decide what response is needed?
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Interfaces and Contradictions
DrPat reads a lot, and frequently writes about books on Paper Frigate. One recent blog entry caught my eye, a review of Beyond Engineering by Robert Pool. DrPat briefly covers the major sections of the book, then concludes with the following:
In this increasingly technological age, the complexity of technology has grown to the point where no one person can know everything about even a very restricted discipline, at the same time that more and more of societal attention is focused on how these complex systems interact. Pool's book is a good first step on the road to the re-engineering of engineering itself, and an excellent argument that such a sweeping change is essential.