Web Operations

Chapter 7. How Complex Systems Fail

John Allspaw

Richard Cook

WHEN I FIRST READ DR. RICHARD COOK'S ESSAY, "How Complex Systems Fail," I was convinced that he had written the piece specifically for the field of web operations. It is a concise and insightful article on the observations of failure and degradation that could have been inspired by years of experience running the distributed architectures for high-volume web companies. As I read through the observations in the essay, I kept remembering events in my own experience troubleshooting degradations and failures that happen when you operate a complex and fast-growing web application.

As it turns out, Dr. Cook is a physician, educator, and researcher at the University of Chicago. He really nailed this topic that spans across many different disciplines and fields. Whether it's structural engineering, space exploration, or patient safety in the medical field, complex systems all have commonalities when it comes to failure. Web operations is one such field.

How Complex Systems Fail

(Being a Short Treatise on the Nature of Failure; How Failure Is Evaluated; How Failure Is Attributed to Proximate Cause; and the Resulting New Understanding of Patient Safety)

By Richard I. Cook, MD, Cognitive Technologies Laboratory, University of Chicago

Complex systems are intrinsically hazardous systems

All of the interesting systems (e.g., transportation, healthcare, power generation) are inherently and unavoidably hazardous by their own nature. The frequency ...