reliability
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🪑 The missing leg of reliability
After a conversation with Tim Bird about Space-Grade Linux, an idea about reliability emerged. The obvious legs of reliable systems are design and testing. What is less obvious is the third leg: active users. Use, coupled with the ability t…
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📦 More definitions of a release
A release must be: reliable, useful, repeatable, and predictable. This delivers outcomes of: quality, value, timeliness, and consistency. The second group is the outcome we want, the first group is what we focus on to get there.
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⚖️ Reliability tradeoffs
Recently, one of our servers running Arch Linux refused to boot after updates. The fix was to comment out a line in the /etc/default/grub file. It took about 15 minutes to find and everything was done in a rescue terminal — no need to boot …
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⚖️ Reliability, Cost, and Value
Everything has a cost and value to the customer. How much value does the customer put on 99.999% reliability vs the value of other features they need? If one system out of a thousand fails every 3 years (0.033% failure rate per year), what …
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🔗 What defines reliability?
Reliability is a common concern - this thing is critical - it needs to work! Many things affect the reliability of a system: Bugs in software we write Bugs in 3rd party components (OSS, etc.) Hardware failures Edge condition failures (thin…
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✨ The easiest path to reliability ...
… is simplicity. Not that we dumb things down and avoid new technology. That is false simplicity. As we discussed previously, the problem is most often not with the underlying technology, but rather the stuff we do. Therefore, if we can sim…
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🔍 Where do reliability/stability problems typically come from?
99% of the time, system bugs/problems come from the stuff you do. The code you wrote. The hardware you designed. The system you configured. The custom PRC system you created. Rarely are we affected by stability problems in the Linux kernel,…