When Everything Is Critical, Nothing Is

It's 3am and a payment service is failing. The engineer who answers has never touched it, and the next hour goes to finding someone who can fix it.

In this episode, Lee goes further than his article "When Everything Is Critical, Nothing Is." The article named the two missing decisions. This episode is about how to make them: which services matter most, and which one team owns each of them.

In this episode:

• The four service tiers, in plain terms
• Three questions that keep everything from landing in Tier 1
• Why every tier is a budget decision, and why you should cap Tier 1
• The dependency trap: a Tier 1 service is only as reliable as the lower-tier service it can't live without
• What "owner" means: paged, planned, permitted
• Inherited services, and an exercise to run this week

Links:

• Read the original article
• The ownership-gap diagnostic
• STOSA
• Get the SAI newsletter
• Atchison Academy courses