Ep:29 Humans, Systems or AIs - The Principles of Reliability Apply - With Tech Veteran Anne Currie

So the first thing I'm going to do is set the scene a little bit by talking about what are the major failure points in a communication system so that we can kind of, we're all on the same page.

So in most kind of communication systems and most systems are at heart, most human systems are at heart communication systems.

You've got the supplier of the piece of communication, which in this case is me and my guests or my co-hosts.

The network, which we use to supply that information to the other side of it, that's the usually combination of things.

That's the internet.

That's... my podcast host, Riverside Studios.

And then the final key component of a communication system is you, the consumer, the listener or the watcher.

Now, in episode 26, I had Sam Newman, author of Building Microservices and his forthcoming Building Resilient Systems on the podcast.

And He talks about something that he called a socio-technical system.

Now, a socio-technical system is basically any kind of complex system.

What I've just talked to you about there, a podcast like this one is a socio-technical system because you've got people, me or my co-hosts, and you as the listener or watcher involved.

And our behaviors change.

There are technical things that we can't do much about.

The network, you know, if the internet goes down, then that's one kind of failure mode we can't do that much about.

But as watchers or listeners or hosts, there's loads of things that we can do to change our behavior to make a system more resilient to failure.

And I'm going to be talking about some of those today in this short podcast episode.

Because that is one of the ways that you can react to situations to make your whole system more resilient, which is to apply a graceful downgrade, a graceful downgrade.

downgrade of function, which provides most of the value, but not all of the value.

So in this case, where I'm going to be applying two types of graceful downgrade to this particular podcast episode, one will be a little bit shorter than usual, and the other is it will just be me.

So that's two classic ways of making the system simpler and therefore easier to deliver.

So as I said, I'm going to talk about the three components that can fail in the system.

The supplier, me in this case, the network, the internet, say, and the consumer, you.

Maybe you don't have time.

I normally put this podcast out on a Monday, but maybe you're busy this Monday and you can't listen to it to Wednesday or Friday.

That's All of us in this system have failure modes and that's not wrong.