PracOps

PracOps is a technical philosophy developed by Robert Brockway. The philosophy focuses on the use of free and open source software and aims to keep systems as simple possible while still achieving their operational objectives reliably. PracOps argues that humans should be able to fully understand the functioning of a system.

Change

Change of the sake of change is bad.

There is such a thing as feature completeness.

Consistency

Environments should be as consistent as feasible. Avoid exceptions where feasible.

Purpose

An organisation should implement a solution which meets their needs. Too many organisations just do what other, often larger, organisations do. As a result many computer systems are much more expensive, complex and unreliable than they need to be.

Many organisations can estimate maximum loads. Eg, in general a government department providing a service in a jurisdiction knows that the maximum number of people who can use their service is the number of people who reside in the jurisdiction. Provisioning a service which can scale far past this, or even only becomes economical at scales beyond the size of the jurisdiction is suboptimal.

Monitoring

The purpose of monitoring is to describe the bonunds of the running system, not merely to detect specific failure more. Properly configured a monitor will alert when the behaviour of the system moves outside the pre-defined limits. These limits could be statically or dynamically assigned.

Reliability

Unscheduled outages should be minimised. A concerning trend in IT since 2010 is to acclimate users to outages and failures. Users should expect more of the computer systems they use.

Pracops argues that computers are ultimately tools. Tools that require excessive maintenance to work are not good tools.

People expect their car to start on demand but apparently accept far more failures from general computer systems.

Data from the Uptime Institute clearly shows that outages are getting longer.

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