<p><a href="https://adventuresindevops.com/episodes/2025/10/20/solving-incidents-with-one-time-ephemeral-runbooks" target="_blank">Share Episode</a> ⸺ Episode Sponsor: <a href="https://dev0ps.fyi/attribute" target="_blank">Attribute</a> - <a href="https://dev0ps.fyi/attribute" target="_blank">https://dev0ps.fyi/attribute</a><br /><br />In the wake of one of the worst AWS incidents in history, we're joined by Lawrence Jones, Founding Engineer at Incident.io. The conversation focuses on the challenges of managing incidents in highly regulated environments like FinTech, where the penalties for downtime are harsh and require a high level of rigor and discipline in the response process. Lawrence details the company's evolution, from running a monolithic Go binary on Heroku to moving to a more secure, robust setup in GCP, prioritizing the use of native security primitives like GCP Secret Manager and Kubernetes to meet the obligations of their growing customer base.</p><p>We spotlight exactly how a system can crawl GitHub pull requests, Slack channels, telemetry data, and past incident post-mortems to dynamically generate an ephemeral runbook for the current incident.Also discussed are the technical challenges of using RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), noting that they rely heavily on pre-processing data with tags and a service catalog rather than relying solely on less consistent vector embeddings to ensure fast, accurate search results during a crisis.</p><p>Finally, Lawrence stresses that frontier models are no longer the limiting factor in building these complex systems; rather, success hinges on building structured, modular systems, and doing the hard work of defining objective metrics for improvement.</p><b>💡 Notable Links:</b><br /><ul><li><a href="https://authress.io/knowledge-base/academy/topics/credential-management" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cloud Secrets management at scale</a></li><li><a href="https://adventuresindevops.com/episodes/2025/09/17/chosing-the-best-database-for-ml/" target="_blank">Episode: Solving Time Travel in RAG Databases</a></li><li><a href="https://adventuresindevops.com/episodes/2025/09/24/the-introduction-to-vector-databases/" target="_blank">Episode: Does RAG Replace keyword search?</a></li></ul><b>🎯 Picks:</b><br /><ul><li>Warren - <a href="https://amzn.to/47hveKK" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Anker Adpatable  Wall-Charger - PowerPort Atom III</a></li><li>Lawrence - Rocktopus & <a href="https://amzn.to/47v4jwa" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Checklist Manifesto</a></li></ul>

Adventures in DevOps

Will Button, Warren Parad

Solving incidents with one-time ephemeral runbooks

OCT 20, 202549 MIN
Adventures in DevOps

Solving incidents with one-time ephemeral runbooks

OCT 20, 202549 MIN

Description

<p><a href="https://adventuresindevops.com/episodes/2025/10/20/solving-incidents-with-one-time-ephemeral-runbooks" target="_blank">Share Episode</a> ⸺ Episode Sponsor: <a href="https://dev0ps.fyi/attribute" target="_blank">Attribute</a> - <a href="https://dev0ps.fyi/attribute" target="_blank">https://dev0ps.fyi/attribute</a><br /><br />In the wake of one of the worst AWS incidents in history, we're joined by Lawrence Jones, Founding Engineer at Incident.io. The conversation focuses on the challenges of managing incidents in highly regulated environments like FinTech, where the penalties for downtime are harsh and require a high level of rigor and discipline in the response process. Lawrence details the company's evolution, from running a monolithic Go binary on Heroku to moving to a more secure, robust setup in GCP, prioritizing the use of native security primitives like GCP Secret Manager and Kubernetes to meet the obligations of their growing customer base.</p><p>We spotlight exactly how a system can crawl GitHub pull requests, Slack channels, telemetry data, and past incident post-mortems to dynamically generate an ephemeral runbook for the current incident.Also discussed are the technical challenges of using RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), noting that they rely heavily on pre-processing data with tags and a service catalog rather than relying solely on less consistent vector embeddings to ensure fast, accurate search results during a crisis.</p><p>Finally, Lawrence stresses that frontier models are no longer the limiting factor in building these complex systems; rather, success hinges on building structured, modular systems, and doing the hard work of defining objective metrics for improvement.</p><b>💡 Notable Links:</b><br /><ul><li><a href="https://authress.io/knowledge-base/academy/topics/credential-management" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cloud Secrets management at scale</a></li><li><a href="https://adventuresindevops.com/episodes/2025/09/17/chosing-the-best-database-for-ml/" target="_blank">Episode: Solving Time Travel in RAG Databases</a></li><li><a href="https://adventuresindevops.com/episodes/2025/09/24/the-introduction-to-vector-databases/" target="_blank">Episode: Does RAG Replace keyword search?</a></li></ul><b>🎯 Picks:</b><br /><ul><li>Warren - <a href="https://amzn.to/47hveKK" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Anker Adpatable Wall-Charger - PowerPort Atom III</a></li><li>Lawrence - Rocktopus & <a href="https://amzn.to/47v4jwa" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Checklist Manifesto</a></li></ul>