For too long, enterprise software teams have been sold a false choice: trade autonomy for control, velocity for compliance, innovation for governance. All under the banner of the “platform.”
But here’s the truth: most platforms weren’t built for your world.
They were built to lock you in, box you out, and force you to play by someone else’s rules.
I run the web series Humans of Reliability, and in our most recent episode I interviewed Chris Ferraro (VP of Platform Eng at Garner Health), and he talked about the time he caused a global outage at Microsoft.
Here's a (slightly condensed) retelling of his story:
I'm one of three people (at least that I know) who’ve brought Microsoft down globally. We were making a group policy change, two of us at the same time. There was a bug in the software and voila—nobody cares exactly how it happened, it just happened. We were completely down for 15 minutes. Fortunately, one of my engineering partners Jason Hughes and I had put in some reliability tooling right before this particular change we made and we were alerted promptly. But it was still a global outage, and there’s really no “good” or “short” global outage, especially at Microsoft’s scale. I'm not gonna blow any sunshine up anybody here. We were able to respond quickly and bring Microsoft back up quickly, but it was a bad day.
I sat through the postmortem, and that was memorable to say the least. I've never had that many people in a room who are all concerned about what I was about to say. I think it's probably the most formative event in my life when it comes to being able to manage through chaos and adversity, and now being able to really be there for engineers when things go wrong—because they will. It showed me how we can all come together in those moments and make the situation better, not worse. But it definitely was the only moment in my career I ever thought “shoot, should I just walk out the door right now?”
The thing that kept me coming back, at least in the immediate sense, was curiosity. I kept thinking “How the F did that happen?” I went home and tried to recreate it. It didn't work. But I was like, the only thing that was anomalous was this one thing, so I was able to go back to the lab and keep trying to figure it out. Thank you to my managers for allowing me to have that crack at it, because I think I would have gone insane without it, but I went back. I found the thing that I thought was anomalous. I kept going back and I tested in the lab and we nailed it. So initially, it was just this burning curiosity, but long term—man, problem solving is fun. That’s sort of what life is about, it’s the reason why I was an engineer in the first place.
In that moment, I also had an engineering manager at Microsoft who gave me some feedback, and he chose such a harsh moment and delivery in doing so. I viscerally remember it. But that lesson came to fruition when I was a CTO at a Crypto startup. One of my engineers brought down prod by making a change to dev—and everybody knows environmental separation, we all say it's this golden way—but we never do it right the first time. Anyway, this happened to this engineer and I just looked at him and I remembered what that felt like, and that I could make it better or I could make it worse. So I said, “Hey, you brought down a crypto startup with no customers. We're gonna survive. I'm here. I brought down Microsoft globally. Let's push through. Don't worry. All your friends right now, they're just upset they got to work the weekend, they're not upset with you. We're gonna get through it. You're a great engineer. Let’s play on.”
When we experience a stressful event, the amygdala, an area of the brain that contributes to emotional processing, sends a distress signal to the hypothalamus. This area of the brain functions like a command centre, communicating with the rest of the body to energize our fight-or-flight response. When this happens the part of the brain that is responsible for reasoning shuts down.
Those familiar with the work of Daniel Kahneman (2012) might recognize this as a System 1 takeover of System 2 (those not familiar can refer to this summary by Loo (2024). Essentially, the brain’s fast, automatic response system is preventing us from entering the slow, effortful, and logical thinking mode required to solve more complicated problems. This temporary loss of cognitive control can be bad news in situations where there isn’t a clearcut solution or procedure to follow and we need to harness System 2’s learning capabilities.
Fortunately there are many things we can do to get better at managing stress in difficult situations and ensure people are able to learn effectively. This blog post breaks a variety of research on this subject into 8 practical tips.
At Rootly we also recently released an on-call paging solution and many of our customers have been making the move off of PagerDuty. We’ve made it super easy to migrate and our solution is about 50% less expensive than PD. But really the biggest benefit is probably the consolidation of all incident mgmt into one tool. We’re always happy to demo the tool (no obligations). If you happen to be at KubeCon or SRECon this week, we’ll be there giving live demos as well!
Same here. Access to screens has opened a lot of valuable conversations for us with my 6 year old and understanding how to use tech appropriately. We recently had a talk about the difference between the iPad "making him feel better" and "distracting him from his feelings". He ended up opting to make cookies with me instead of watching YouTube after he'd gotten upset. He's also the first to point out to the other kids when something is "probably not real" because we've had so many conversations about how what we see on a screen isn't always real. He's definitely going to be the kid who ruins Santa for the others lol.
But here’s the truth: most platforms weren’t built for your world. They were built to lock you in, box you out, and force you to play by someone else’s rules.
At CloudBees, we believe in a different path.