How to conduct a cloud fire drill

Do you have a plan for a potential website outage? Do you know if it works?

Without verification your plan is only a hunch. You can choose to verify your plan on your own, on purpose, in controlled circumstances; or while your site is down during the biggest day of your career. Having a plan is only half of the equation. Learn how to test your response plan on your own terms, by planning and executing “fire drills.”

Episode 117 : How to conduct a cloud fire drill

Recorded Live: 10-1-2015

Participants
Hosts:
Alan Bush: @AlanBush – Rackspace Community Manager
Drew Cox: @DrewCoxSA – Enterprise Technical Advisor

Highlights
Healthy fear (3:55)
Analogies (5:11)
Fire drills (5:58)
“Safety Rules” (6:50)
Know your site (11:41)
Review each component & have a fall back (12:32)
Identify choke points (13:26)
Verify monitoring solution (14:27)
Agree on a collaboration platform (16:09)
Brand a “Sorry Page” (17:30)
Your team needs to know the plan (18:54)
Know your escalation path (19:55)
Practice fire drill (21:10)
What needs verification? (21:57)
Re-seller conflicts (24:54)
Fire drill Process (26:08)
Tips & Tricks (28:11)
Monitoring/Testing tools and Rackspace Infrastructure (34:53)
Redundant monitoring alarms (35:52)
Multiple admins (39:29)
Monitoring the monitors (41:25)
Fire Drills from home and outside the office (47:07)
Automated fire drills [Chaos Monkey] (49:59)
Fire drill scenarios part 1 (52:55)
Fire drill scenarios part 2 (56:37)