Natalie Conklin, tamer of chaos and Head of Engineering here at Gremlin, joins us to talk about embracing change, working alongside each other, and building more reliable systems. Natalie has a talk coming up at DevOpsDays Boise which she has titled “Embracing Change Fearlessly.” Her talk is oriented around enabling teams to take calculated risks and having the guts to take those risks. Natalie spent time working in India, which helped solidify her “fearlessly” philosophy.

For this episode we’re continuing to “Build Things on Purpose” with JJ Tang, co-founder of Rootly, who joins us to talk about incident response, the tool he’s built, and his many lessons learned from incidents. Rootly is aiming to automate some of the more tedious work around incidents, and keeping that consistency. JJ chats about why he and his co-founder built Rootly, and the problems they’re trying to fix and eliminate when it comes to reliability.

Today’s enterprises are struggling to cope with the complexities of their environments, technologies, and applications. On top of these challenges, they face faster release rates, and the need to always deliver the highest level of performance and availability to end-users, at the lowest possible cost.

Whenever an online service goes down, you're likely to hear three words: "it was DNS!" Blaming DNS might be a running joke among network admins and engineers, but it's one rooted in experience. DNS problems are known for causing massive, Internet-wide outages such as the 2021 Akamai outage that temporarily made the websites for Delta Air Lines, American Express, Airbnb, and others unreachable.