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Velocity 2012: Richard Cook, "How Complex Systems Fail"

O'Reilly · talk · Watch on YouTube

Cloud, DevOps & reliabilityDistributed systems

What it is

Dr. Richard Cook, a physician and patient safety researcher, presents his ideas on how complex systems fail, at Velocity 2012. He argues for designing for resiliency rather than trying to exhaustively handle every failure mode.

Why Hacker News recommends it

HN people recommend it as a must-watch for anyone running complex systems, and some rewatch it regularly to remember its principles.

  • 3 people recommended it
  • 4 different months
  • 1 strong recommendations
  • first 2013, last 2021

What HN commenters said

  1. “I would watch this talk every couple of months to remind myself of the principles.”

    Adds context to the principles; rewatched regularly.

    wenc, 2020-12 · Strong recommendation · in “How Complex Systems Fail (1998)”

  2. “there is a nice talk on failure from richard cook at the velocity conf”

    Nice talk on failure in complex systems.

    rjzzleep, 2013-01 · Recommendation · in “Stop Fetishizing Failure”

  3. “Richards Cooks How complex systems fail from velocity a couple of years ago”

    Offered as a must-watch talk with accompanying paper.

    hedwall, 2017-02 · Recommendation · in “Ask HN: What are some 'must watch' talks?”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: resilience, operations, safety engineering, incident analysis, richard cook

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