The Human Side of Digital Operations

On February 28, 2017, a significant AWS outage due to human error affected major internet services like Slack, Quora, GitHub, and Trello, highlighting the challenges of managing large-scale incidents, particularly the human aspects such as reaching key personnel across time zones. PagerDuty, a digital operations management platform, plays a crucial role in helping teams manage such incidents by providing a reliable system for coordinating responses, ensuring that critical information remains accessible even when cloud-based services are down. While traditionally focusing on Engineering and IT, PagerDuty's potential extends to other business areas like HR, which can benefit from its integrated approach to crisis management, enabling seamless communication and coordination across various departments. This incident underscores the importance of having a robust infrastructure for people data and response orchestration, encouraging HR and other teams to adopt practices from engineering and DevOps to enhance accountability and efficiency. By leveraging centralized data and machine learning, organizations can proactively identify patterns and improve incident response through collaborative and agile workflows, ultimately enhancing the overall customer and employee experience.