avleen

On call is an interesting thing.

We have about 7 people in the rotation right now and we spend a lot of time and effort trying to reduce alert fatigue and numbness to pages. We haven't looked at that particular correlation between those two things, but I'm curious now! I'll start tracking it next week ;-)

We do a lot of other things, such as monitoring sleep patterns. Several people on the team wear motion trackers or use sleep tracking apps on their phones. I'll be talking about this more at Velocity NY, but there's something there for sure.

I personally try to avoid drinking while on call ;-)

Depends - which one of them will buy me pizza afterwards?

We looked at a number of solutions a few years ago and none of them (at the time) met our requirements for simplicity and flexibility. Most were very heavyweight solutions.

One of the things we love here, is the ability to keep things as simple as possible. That includes our software, our processes and our changes. We based our solution on that. It started off as a collection of shell scripts, and eventually was rewritten in Ruby. It's still incredibly simple, and easy to debug when things break, and affords us the flexibility we want.

As an example, we can add very custom modules to test backups to ensure they're correct.

I won't say it was easy, or that I'd recommend it for everyone, but it works for us.

I think you're right. I spoke about this at length at LISA '11 and the same question came up there.

A lot of CD is to do with culture, much more than tools. I know people who do it with Deployinator, Jenkins, Dreadnot, and a bunch of other things. But the culture is really what makes it. Once you have the culture moving in the right direction, where developers are happy pushing code and owning software problems, and operations teams are OK letting go of the control and working with developers, the tools become less important.

(I realise this isn't directly answering your question, so I'll summarise with: better CD tools like Deployinator and Dreadnot, and better/easier unit testing things are always good.)

If that were the case, I would never have met my wife!

(full disclosure, brandyvig is my wife ;-) )