Real Talk: What We Think We Know — That Just Ain’t So

Dr. David Woods once said to me “We cannot call it a scientific field unless we can admit we’ve gotten things wrong in the past.” Do we, in this community, do that? Well-formed critique is critical for any field — including SRE — to progress. I’d like to talk about a few ideas, assumptions, and concepts often talked about in this community but whose validity is rarely questioned or explored. John Allspaw has worked in software systems engineering and operations for over twenty years in many different environments. John’s publications include the books *The Art of Capacity Planning* (2009) and *Web Operations* (2010) as well as the forward to *The DevOps Handbook.* His 2009 Velocity talk with Paul Hammond, *10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation* helped start the DevOps movement. John