"It seemed like a good idea at the time"
From Wikipedia:
In software engineering, an anti-pattern (or antipattern) is a pattern that may be commonly used but is ineffective and/or counterproductive in practice.
For Operations, there is selection of wide-spread Anti-Patterns that are applicable to every organization. There is also another variety of Anti-Pattern that will be more localized or application-specific. We are priamrily interested in those which were well thought out, seemingly reasonable solutions, only for them to turn into painfully complex and unwieldy in practice.
PatternThe only way to solve our problems is to build it ourselves.Story(Editor’s Note: This is a very special anti-pattern in that I’ve personally seen it at multiple companies at varying levels. In order to preserve the anonymity of my sources however, I will group all of these stories together under...
PatternInventory is low-priority busy work.Story(Editor’s Note: In order to preserve the anonymity of my sources, the company in question will be referred to as “Excited Monkey Company”, or “EMC.” And I will pick a random name for ops engineers, such as “Ryan.”)Managing Operations at EMC was a monumental task, where...
PatternAny changes to a functional system will put its stability in jeopardy (also known as ”if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”)Story(Editor’s Note: In order to preserve the anonymity of my sources, the company in question will be referred to as “Friendly Business”, or “FB.” And I will pick a...
PatternDNS as a global system is straight-forward and tolerant to mistakes.Story(Editor’s Note: Unlike our last story, this one has no need for anonymization, since your editor was the one who screwed up here.)For various reasons, I decided to move registrars which included moving a lot of domains, including the most...
PatternsProduction is sacred, giving developers any access is too dangerous.The Ops team has its own set of goals and priorities, that are separate from the dev teams.Story(Editor’s Note: In order to preserve the anonymity of my sources, the company shall be referred to as “Secret Company Organization”, or “SCO.” And...
This site/blog is intended to be a dumping ground for the research that I am doing into the subject of “Operations Anti-Patterns.”My goal is to curate a list of useful anecdotes and war stories that, at a glance, can serve as a good sanity check for Operations solutions in the...