Speaker: Christina Yakomin

This panel will aim to explore, share ideas and provide pragmatic insight around some key areas related to designing, running and maintaining resilient architectures.

Do you remember the Scientific Method from elementary school science class? It's time to dust off that knowledge and use it to your advantage to test your IT systems! In this session, you'll be re-introduced to the Scientific Method, and learn how Vanguard's software engineers and IT architects draw inspiration from it in their resilience testing efforts. We’ll do a deep dive into the "Failure Modes and Effects Analysis" technique, in which engineers examine complex architecture diagrams, asking themselves questions about the failure modes of various technical components and developing hypotheses based on their expectations of how the system would behave. Then, we’ll discuss how the engineers use these conjectures as inputs into experimentation, selecting and executing chaos experiments accordingly to validate (or disprove!) their hypotheses. We’ll even take a look behind the curtain at how some of these fault injection tests are implemented at Vanguard.