Hasnain says:

“We need to build in the ability to reconfigure our systems in advance, without knowing exactly what sorts of changes we’ll need to make. The Canva engineers had some powerful operational knobs at their disposal through the Cloudflare firewall configuration. This allowed them to make changes. The more powerful and generic these sorts of dynamic configuration features are, the more room for maneuver we have. Of course, dynamic configuration is also dangerous, and is itself a contributor to incidents. Too often we focus solely on the dangers of such functionality in creating incidents, without seeing its ability to help us reconfigure the system to mitigate incidents.

Finally, these sorts of operator interfaces are of no use if the responders aren’t familiar with them. Ultimately, the more your responders know about the system, the better position they’ll be in to implement these adaptations. Changing an unhealthy system is dangerous: no matter how bad things are, you can always accidentally make things worse. The more knowledge about the system you can bring to bear during an incident, the better position you’ll be in to adaptive your system to extend that competence envelope.”

Posted on 2025-01-26T03:43:36+0000