LISA17 - Have You Tried Turning It Off and Turning It On Again?

Tanya Reilly looks at disaster recovery from a scary point of view: what if every system you currently manage were to turn off and turn back on again right now? In this framing, she looks at how to make your environment more resilient to issues that you would normally assume you could ride through.

Have You Tried Turning It Off and Turning It On Again?

Tanya Reilly, Google
@whereistanya

Most of us have a backup strategy and many of us have a restore strategy and several of us have a fully tested restore strategy. But backups are far from the whole story! This talk covers the parts of disaster recovery you might be less prepared for, and the dependencies that you might not think about until one day when you really do turn an entire service, entire site or (perish the thought!) an entire company off and on again.

We'll look at why the best laid fallback plans tend to go wrong, and why you should start deliberately managing your dependencies long before you think you need to. And we'll look at dependency cycles that make it difficult or impossible to restart groups of systems. Like, where do you store the documentation on how to recover the documentation server?

View the full LISA17 program: https://www.usenix.org/lisa17/program