What is resilience engineering?
summary
Distinguishes robustness (redundancy, failover, retries) from resilience and claims robust designs fail against unknown unknowns; shows Chernobyl as a cascade of hidden assumptions and management pressure. Argues for socio-technical systems thinking, Safety Science, and active experimentation—chaos engineering experiments like fire drills, killing services and pulling network cables—to reveal system limits. Recommends good logging, monitoring and blameless postmortems so accidents become learning events and resilience complements, not replaces, robustness.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Introduction and speaker background
- 1:52What is resilience?
- 5:24Robustness vs resilience
- 10:45Known vs unknown risks
- 15:23Engineering resilience
- 20:00Socio-technical systems and Chernobyl
- 25:16Learning from system complexity
- 27:26Human and technical interplay
- 28:32Conclusion and key takeaways
- 29:55Q&A on practical application
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