Tanukis with Hammers: The dangers of third-party tooling

A presentation at Deserted Island DevOps by Laura Santamaria

It’s lovely to spend time decorating your house and grounds while tanukis come in mysteriously and upgrade your house when you’re not watching. It’s also lovely to build on top of other tooling so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. However, what would happen if Timmy and Tommy decided to tell Mr. Nook that they’d rather watch for shooting stars one night? Do you understand how your third-party tooling works, or, more importantly, why it was built in the first place? Many platforms have been built on third-party tooling without thinking about the full implications of what happens when different systems might go down, and those platforms fall apart when there’s an issue because the folks who built them don’t understand how that third-party tooling they relied on works in the first place. We want to avoid that reckoning, but how? How can we be sure our houses will get upgraded if Timmy and Tommy were to go on strike? Let’s talk about it.

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