Resilience

My old Windows laptop started shutting itself down in the London flat during one of the Covid heatwaves. It had enough CPU for what I was asking it to do, Windows still booted and the applications still opened, but the machine could not keep itself inside its thermal limits in the room. Cleaning the fans and repasting the CPU were the fixes that still felt mechanical, the sort of thing you could do with a small screwdriver, a tube of thermal paste and the belief that dust or bad contact was the problem. ThrottleStop came after that, because by then I was trying to get more control over the Dell’s CPU throttling and power behaviour when it hit its limits, before it decided the situation was unsafe and shut itself down. The cooling pad helped a bit, but only in the way extra airflow helps when the air being pushed around is already too warm. ...

A few weeks ago, recertifying my AWS Solutions Architect Professional cert for the second time, the course covered AWS Fault Injection Service, and it made me think about a company where the backups had been failing for a long time and nobody knew. The backups ran weekly to a server at a remote site, and the tapes were swapped by someone there whose job had nothing to do with infrastructure. Every swap the job had failed and the screen had shown a red line saying so, but the person doing the swapping had no reason to know red meant the backup had not worked. The job ran every week and the light was red every week. Nobody who could read the light was looking at it. ...