Company
Date Published
Author
Jess Lin
Word count
2519
Language
English
Hacker News points
18

Summary

Andreas Fuchs, an engineer at Stripe, played a pivotal role in developing the "Big Red Button" (BRB), an internal incident response tool designed to streamline the process of reporting and managing incidents. Initially facing challenges due to existing manual procedures and communication inefficiencies during incidents, BRB introduced automation by creating dedicated Slack channels with memorable names to enhance coordination. The tool's successful adoption was attributed to strategic rollout decisions, such as limiting initial usage to less severe incidents and allowing employees to voluntarily engage with it, which led to widespread acceptance and requests for broader functionality. The evolution of BRB was further supported by the establishment of the Reliability Tooling team and the appointment of full-time Incident Response Managers, which underscored the importance of organizational structures in effective incident management. Fuchs emphasizes that incident response is fundamentally a human process, and tools should be designed to complement human decision-making and interaction, with careful consideration of technical choices and integration with existing systems.