Watering the Roots of Resilience - Learning from Failure with Decision Trees

Explore how Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) can align their mental models with system reality in this 41-minute conference talk from SREcon23 Americas. Delve into the concept of adaptation in complex systems and learn the importance of resilience stress testing to expose the messy reality of software environments. Examine example chaos experiments and discover how to document and visualize mental models using decision trees, which can inform design improvements and further experiments. Gain practical insights on reasoning about stressors and surprises in systems, and learn about open-source tools that can be applied to everyday SRE work. By the end of the talk, understand how decision trees empower SREs to enhance system resilience and adapt to changing conditions in complex sociotechnical environments.