Why Your 'Reliable' System Will Fail

Video Description

If you're a Senior Software Developer, Architect, or Engineering Leader, you need to stop doing Root Cause Analysis (RCA) and start asking the right questions. David Blank-Edelman, SRE Academy Program Lead at Microsoft, exposes the dangerous myths that keep your systems unstable, your teams burnt out, and your customers frustrated. Learn the critical difference between mere fault tolerance and true resilience—a key concept for the future of robust system design. David reveals seven provocative questions that force a complete rethink of how you approach system failure, observability, and the actual value of SRE in your organization. ⏱️ Video Timestamps (For Navigation) 0:00 The Rilke Question: Why you must live the questions now. 1:15 Reliability is NOT Just Availability: The 7 dimensions of reliability (Latency, Throughput, Fidelity, etc.). 3:05 Quiz: Is Your Outage an Existential Crisis? (The Customer Perspective). 5:50 The SRE Mindset: Curiosity, Collaboration, and Failure as Signal. 8:10 The Myth of Root Cause: Why single-cause thinking fails in complex systems. 10:35 Stop Doing the 5 Whys: Why this common technique is terrible. 12:15 4 Post-Incident Review Traps (Human Error, Counterfactual Reasoning, etc.). 16:00 The 5 Stages of SRE: From Firefighting to Partnering. 18:40 How to Sell Reliability Internally (and what not to claim). 21:00 The Conservation of Toil: Are you trading toil for complexity? 23:00 Resilience is a Verb: Why your "resilient" architecture is just fault tolerant. 🔗 Transcript available on InfoQ: https://bit.ly/4ajn5bK #SRE #ReliabilityEngineering #SoftwareArchitecture