Database Chaos with Tammy Butow

Tammy Butow has worked at Digital Ocean and Dropbox, where she built out infrastructure and managed engineering teams. At both of these companies, the customer base was at a massive scale.

At Dropbox, Tammy worked on the database that holds metadata used by Dropbox users to access their files. To call this metadata system simply a “database” is an understatement–it is actually a multi-tiered system of caches and databases. This metadata is extremely sensitive–this is metadata that tells you where the objects across Dropbox are located–so it has to be highly available.

To encourage that reliability, Tammy helped institute chaos engineering–inducing random failures across the Dropbox infrastructure, and making sure that the Dropbox systems could automatically respond to those failures. If you are unfamiliar with the topic, we have covered chaos engineering in two previous episodes of Software Engineering Daily.

Tammy now works at Gremlin, a company that does chaos engineering as a service. In this show we talked about her experiences at Dropbox, and how to institute chaos engineering across databases. We also explored how her work at Gremlin–a smaller startup–compares to Dropbox and Digital Ocean, which are larger companies.

Show Notes

Tammy Butow Chaos Engineering Bootcamp

Information to run your own Chaos Day

How to Create a Kubernetes Cluster on Ubuntu 16.04 with kudeadm and Weave Net | Gremlin Community

Transcript

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