An introduction to Taleb's idea of antifragile and how it's useful when thinking about computer systems.

1. Antifragility
@dlutzy

3. Fragile
Robust

4. Fragile
Robust
Antifragile

5. Fragile
Example: glass
Shatters when exposed to even a small
stressor.

6. Robust
Example: steel bar
Resists even a large amount stress. But is
inflexible. When exposed to enough stress
it breaks.

7. Antifragile
Example: muscle
When exposed to stress it gets stronger.

8. Is this idea applicable to
computer systems?

11. “if antifragility is the property of all
those natural (and complex)
systems that have survived,
depriving these systems of
volatility, randomness, and
stressors will harm them.” - Taleb

12. Without change something sleeps
inside us, and seldom awakens. The
sleeper must awaken.
- Duke Leto Atreides

13. Antifragility is all around us, if
we look for it.
* evolution
* business
* restaurants

14. Allspaw says:
“MTTR is more important than MTBF”

16. Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 06:07:59 +0000
From: Amazon EC2 Notification <no-reply-aws@amazon.com>
-------------------------------------Dear Amazon EC2 Customer,
One or more of your Amazon EC2 instances in the us-east-1 region is scheduled for
retirement. The following instance(s) will be shut down after 12:00 AM UTC on 2013-10-29.
i-12513862
We recommend that you launch a replacement for each retiring instance and begin migrating
to it.
blah blah
--------------------8<
Sincerely,
Amazon Web Services

17. Continouous integration/deployment ==
antifragile
Legacy systems == robust or (more likely)
fragile