Mentions
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The Origins of Amazon's Cloud Computing
I told Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOM the actual origin of EC2. Chris Pinkham wanted to keep working from South Africa, and I, running ops at Amazon, was at first horrified by the idea.
“I was horrified at the thought of the dirty, public Internet touching MY beautiful operations.”
Ex-Amazon 'Master of Disaster' Animates Server Chef
The Register profiled my move from Amazon's Master of Disaster role to co-founding Opscode and launching Chef, tracing the line from reliability engineering to infrastructure as code.
Velocity: The Art of Web Operations
Tim O'Reilly's note opening Velocity 2009 tells the origin story: Steve Souders, Andy Oram, and I asked for a conference for our community. Two years in, 700 people showed up.
Five Whys: Try to Learn a Dollar's Worth of Lesson for Every One You Spend in Failure
Eric Ries quoted me in his Venture Hacks guide to Five Whys: try to learn a dollar's worth of lesson for every dollar spent in failure. The line came from Amazon GameDay practice.
“Try to learn a dollar's worth of lesson for every one you spend in failure.”
The Do-Good Imperative
BusinessWeek's CEO Guide to Disaster Readiness covered my work at the seam between emergency response and technology, including the Velocity conference I co-founded.
“One of the interesting things with being a pretty senior technology person operating in a disaster is that you get to see the state of the art versus the state of the practice.”
Making Maps Work When Disaster Strikes
Companion piece in BusinessWeek's CEO Guide to Disaster Readiness. I described navigating post-Katrina Louisiana on broken maps and what that says about crisis tooling.
“One of the interesting things with being a pretty senior technology person operating in a disaster is that you get to see the state of the art versus the state of the practice.”
Understanding Operations Culture (Part 1)
I wrote this in 2008 to define web operations culture using what I had learned from the fire service: the habits that separate teams who handle incidents well from teams who don't.
“You don't choose the moment, the moment chooses you. You only choose how prepared you are when it does.”
Operations Is a Competitive Advantage (Secret Sauce for Startups!)
My 2007 O'Reilly Radar argument that operations is a competitive advantage for startups, and occasionally a strategic weapon. Comments thread includes Luke Kanies, John Allspaw, John Willis, and Steve Loughran.