"Chaos Monkey" entries

The two-sided coin of Web performance

Hacking performance across your organization.

I’ve given Web performance talks where I get to show one of my favorite slides with the impact of third-party dependencies on load time. It’s the perfect use case for “those marketing people,” who overload pages with the tracking pixels and tags that make page load time go south. This, of course, would fuel the late-night pub discussrion with fellow engineers about how much faster the Web would be if those marketing people would attend a basic Web performance 101 course.

I’ve also found myself discussing exactly this topic in a meeting. This time, however, I was the guy arguing to keep the tracking code, although I was well aware of the performance impact. So what happened?
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Chaos Monkey for systems of people: The ultimate performance hack

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: Alois Reitbauer on performance hacking, DevOps applications, and fostering a culture of respect.

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In this week’s episode of the Radar Podcast, O’Reilly’s Courtney Nash chats with Alois Reitbauer, chief evangelist at Ruxit, about how DevOps is deeply woven into the Ruxit culture. Reitbauer also talks about how the term “performance hacking” came about at Ruxit, why Chaos Monkey should be applied to systems of people, and why trust across — and between — all departments in an organization is essential.

DevOps beyond DevOps

Performance hacking is a term that emerged at Ruxit about a year ago as the company prepared for the beta launch, Reitbauer said, when they realized as the company scaled up, they needed to bring everyone from all their teams together. “The idea of performance hacking, then,” he noted, “was really, how can we scale up this collaboration between the DevOps teams, the product development teams, and our go-to-market growth hacking teams while we grow as an organization.” The ultimate aim was to figure out how to continue to act like a three-person, one-room startup as the company scaled to a couple hundred people.

One of the approaches embraced at Ruxit is to apply some of the DevOps best practices to their growth hacking and product development strategies. As an example, Reitbauer offered up the idea of Chaos Monkey, as applied not to AWS instances, but to the organization as a whole. The way it works, he explained, is to send a member of a team — any team — away on short notice (or no notice) and see what breaks. Reitbauer said that they’d actually done this and outlined what they learned from the exercise:

We have done it, and it also came up as part of our regular organizational practices. Like, when we had our first very strong conference season — we sent people to different shows all over the place; we picked people from the team who had to go somewhere. And even if people knew they were going to be out of the office in a couple of weeks, they still started to behave as if they would be around all the time, that they wouldn’t be leaving the office. Then, suddenly they were on a plane. They had no time to do their everyday work, and suddenly they realized where they really needed help. So, you don’t even have to make it a total surprise. You just have to plan how to get people out of their regular working behavior to do something else. Then we were able to figure out, ‘We really need somebody else to be able to jump in here or to help somebody out over there.’ It might be a regular holiday or just not daily routine.

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