Given last Friday's global event, I am releasing this week's 30-sec SRE early, with focus on a relevant topic: Blast Radius. The term "Blast Radius" refers to the extent of impact a bad configuration change or system failure can have. Minimizing the blast radius is crucial in designing robust and resilient systems.
Various common release strategies exist to enable the containment of the Blast Radius of a deployment: Canary Releases, Blue-Green Deployment, Feature Flags, etc. It is reasonable to question why the update was pushed out so broadly. However, such questions are easier to ask in hindsight (Spoiler alert: Hindsight Bias will be the subject of a future article).
------------------------------
Ingo Averdunk
Distinguished Engineer
IBM
------------------------------