Comments on: A Public Post Mortem of An Outage https://smbitjournal.com/2016/05/a-public-post-mortem-of-an-outage/ The Information Technology Resource for Small Business Sun, 19 Feb 2017 09:41:45 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.1 By: Scott Alan Miller https://smbitjournal.com/2016/05/a-public-post-mortem-of-an-outage/comment-page-1/#comment-23018 Wed, 11 May 2016 06:11:47 +0000 http://www.smbitjournal.com/?p=792#comment-23018 How does this get us to a criticism of “traditional conservative thinking”?

Because traditional thinking would have said that we should have mitigated before hand, rather than being in a position to have to recover. But the math showed this to have been a big mistake.

]]> By: Scott Alan Miller https://smbitjournal.com/2016/05/a-public-post-mortem-of-an-outage/comment-page-1/#comment-23017 Wed, 11 May 2016 06:10:45 +0000 http://www.smbitjournal.com/?p=792#comment-23017 The post mortem was of the decision making around the planning. I think you’ve missed the purpose of the piece as it was not at all about the process of fixing things after the disaster happened, but about the decision making that contributed to the outage and the determination that the outage was less costly than the cost of mitigating it – which is what goes against traditional thinking. It is extremely common, to the point of being mocked to think otherwise, to believe that almost any cost should be incurred to avoid an outage, especially an extended one. But this is simply not true.

Even when this happened, it was nearly everyone’s opinion, before the post mortem and the costs were analyzed, that a bad decision had been made originally and that this outage could have been avoided. But once we saw the costs of the outage and the cost of having mitigated it, it was clear that the right decision had been made, and dramatically so. But without the post mortem proving this mathematically, nearly everyone was going to write this off as a mistake that had to be recovered from.

]]> By: Anon https://smbitjournal.com/2016/05/a-public-post-mortem-of-an-outage/comment-page-1/#comment-23015 Wed, 11 May 2016 01:48:21 +0000 http://www.smbitjournal.com/?p=792#comment-23015 What is the point of this piece? Something broke, it was fixed, and the people who fixed it did a good job. Who in IT would be opposed to fixing the broken thing? How does this get us to a criticism of “traditional conservative thinking”?

It sounds like someone made a good decision: recover data from the dead server, instead of restoring from backup. This isn’t worthy of a self-congratulating 2000-word romp, it’s a decision made every day by IT professionals everywhere.

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