I like acronyms. More specifically, I like being able to capture concepts with acronyms that can help practitioners remember and internalize them. You may have noticed this in my posts about TILT, PRO, and ACID. An acronym that goes back quite a few years in my career is one that I use to convey my guiding principles of reliable and sustainable infrastructure - C3-P-O. It has an interesting origin story. It was around 1:30am when the text came. I don’t think I heard it until the second time it...

As I described in the introduction to this series, I’ve used the acronym C3-P-O as a tool to help the teams I lead remember some key principles for maintaining a healthy infrastructure environment. This post is about the first “C” in the acronym - Consistency. High levels of operational overhead can often be traced directly back to inconsistencies in the environment. Inconsistency in hardware, configuration, software, or firmware between like components can lead to differences in behavior, slow...

As I described in the introduction to this series, I’ve used the acronym C3-P-O as a tool to help the teams I lead remember some key principles for maintaining a healthy infrastructure environment. This post is about the second “C” in the acronym - Currency. Maintaining software and hardware currency in technology infrastructure is critical for ensuring stability, security, and supportability. While you absolutely need to work to keep things current, this doesn’t mean that you should take up...

As I described in the introduction to this series, I’ve used the acronym C3-P-O as a tool to help the teams I lead remember some key principles for maintaining a healthy infrastructure environment. This post is about the third “C” in the acronym - Continuity. For infrastructure services in particular, continuity of operation is critical. The saying used to be that infrastructure services had to be like the dial tone - always there when you need it (for those of you who remember what “dial tone”...

As I described in the introduction to this series, I’ve used the acronym C3-P-O as a tool to help the teams I lead remember some key principles for maintaining a healthy infrastructure environment. This post is about the “P” in the acronym - Predictability. Before we dig into the details of this part of the acronym, I want to clarify the meaning and intent of using the term Predictability. First, let’s see how Merriam-Webster defines it: I specifically talk about Predictability for the meaning...

As I described in the introduction to this series, I’ve used the acronym C3-P-O as a tool to help the teams I lead remember some key principles for maintaining a healthy infrastructure environment. This post is about the “O” in the acronym - Observability. I touched on Observability in my previous post on PRO Infrastructure, so I won’t go into much further detail here other than to reinforce the principle. It is vitally important that all aspects of a service’s behavior can be seen, tracked,...