Twitter report and SRE

The Twitter Whistleblower Report given by Peiter “Mudge” Zatko makes horrifically fascinating reading.

You can read it here, all 84 pages.

It’s from August but highlights include:

• No SDLC or separate development environments
• Not possible to secure production environments
• No device management or backups
• No privileged access management/control
• DR/BCP and Governance on very shaky ground

Well, totally restful nights sleep over any of that eh?

Its obviously just one side of it. Twitter had some great Engineers - a good article by an ex-SRE :

Why Twitter Didn’t Go Down: From a Real Twitter SRE

Twitter supposedly lost around 80% of its work force.

Matthew’s WritingMatthew Tejo

If you read both you may go “Hmm…” regarding data centres.

Having the overall picture is so important. Some teams may be doing well on one thing, some less well on another. But what does that mean overall? The SRE there doing a cracking job in his little part of the world. But it’s not so good when you look at the fuller picture.

Look at the risks, look at the priorities, sensible action plan. Always look left and right as well as forward.