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Applying smart thinking to open organization principles Ron McFarland Thu, 06/23/2022 - 03:00 1 reader likes this 1 reader likes this

Habits have an unfair reputation of being bad things that need to be stopped. But consider this: Automation and habits have many things in common. First, they're both repetitive. They're done over and over, the exact same way. More importantly, they reduce costs (both cost per piece and cost of energy used).

Art Markman's book Smart Thinking stresses the importance of creating habits to take your mind away from unimportant thoughts and redirect your attention toward more interesting and creative ideas. You can apply this concept to the use of open organization principles.

This article is the second part of a two-part series on habits. The first part drew from a presentation I gave a few years ago. In this article, I apply new information from Markman.

What is smart thinking?

Smart thinking is about the information you have, how you get valuable information, and how you use what you have successfully. It's also the ability to solve new problems using your current knowledge. Smart thinking is a skill you can use, practice, and improve on. Based on that definition, those benefits would be very helpful in promoting open organization principles.

Forming habits

Markman says habits are formed, unthinkingly automatic, and rarely reviewed for their importance. A process of strategic thinking is required to do this review. If performed correctly, less effort is needed to change these habits. The human mental system is designed to avoid thinking when possible. It's preferable to just effortlessly act on routine tasks so you can direct your attention to more important issues. When you perform tasks repeatedly, you form habits so your mind doesn't have to think through them step by step.

That's why you can't remember things you did a few seconds ago. Markman gives the example of not remembering whether you locked the door of your apartment or house. Because you did it automatically, if you were thinking of something completely different when you locked the door, you likely don't know whether you locked it.

The goal of smart thinking is to develop as many good habits as possible, so your mind doesn't have to go through the effort of thinking every time you perform them. Developing checklists is a good way to avoid excessive thinking. This can be applied to open organization principles as well. To save on energy and effort, follow a list of items and act on them. This was my goal when I developed the Communication technology maturity worksheet, which I wrote about in my article "How to assess your organization's technical maturity." If there's no routine and the activity is new, you must resort to a more stressful and tiring thought process.

Importance of environment and repetition

Markman describes a formula for creating smart habits, considering two key facts:

• There is interaction between environment and action.
• Only work on repeated actions to create good habits.

Environment

Markman defines an environment as both the outside world and one's internal mental world (such as goals, feelings, or perspectives). In the outside world, you can develop seemingly meaningless activities to create triggers and reminders. For example, you assign convenient locations for things, so you don't have to think about where they are. You can create triggers (such as lists or empty packages for resupply reminders) to highlight things you need to do, thereby avoiding a lot of thought.

If you want to read a book but have been putting it off, consider taking it out and putting it in front of your computer or TV. That way, you'll see it, and probably have to move it out of your way, each time you're at your computer or TV, which can be a powerful way to get you reading.

If you learn something in a particular place (with all its surroundings), you will recall that learning more easily if you are in a similar place or the same place. The environment triggers the information to come to the top of your mind. Because new (wanted) habits must be consciously performed, you must add elements in your environment to remind yourself to do them. Also, you must eliminate triggers that remind you of the old (unwanted) habit and replace them with another activity.

For the internal mental environment, consider trying to memorize useful facts that are continually required, such as names, locations, the best road routes, and so on. If I meet someone I want to get to know better, I ask for their name and use it as much as possible, then write it down when I have a chance. Later, I add that name to my personal contact information. By repeatedly seeing the name, I eventually memorize it and use it without thinking.

Repetition

All habits are formed through repeated use, and the first time is the hardest. After many repetitions, minimal thought is required, until the habit becomes automatic. Structure your daily life by forming beneficial habits and practicing them. Regular role playing is equally important. By getting those memories top of mind, they become faster to retrieve.

If you can make each habit as distinct as possible, it will be easier to remember and retrieve when needed. You know you've created a good habit when you no longer have to think about it.

When good habits go bad

A habit can go from good to bad with a situational change. Getting rid of a bad habit and creating a productive new one takes a lot of thought. When a habit change is required, regularly getting a good night's sleep is essential. Your brain helps process the new experiences and behaviors and makes the activity more effective in the future.

There are two important characteristics of changing habits:

1. Your current habit pushes you into action. You must overcome the pressure to act.
2. When there's pressure to act, replace the habit with a more helpful action. New memories of the desired action must be developed and stored.

You must develop triggers to engage the new behavior. This trigger requires your attention, as you are forcing yourself to stop the strong current habit and develop a new and, initially, weak habit. If you are distracted, the old habit remains strong. Your effort could also be disrupted by stress, fatigue, or the powerful influence of your environment.

Willpower alone cannot change habits, and it's extremely exhausting to try. You might have some short-term successes, but you will wear out eventually. You need environmental support. Cravings happen when you have an active goal that has been blocked. They are your mind's way of saying you must strengthen your desired goal further. You must not only stop the old habit but study what in your environment is activating it.

To apply these concepts to open organization principles, consider how you can create an environment that makes it easy to activate a principle while discouraging the current unproductive behavior. You must create an environment that reduces the chance of the bad habit being recalled and create triggers to activate the principles. That's the goal of the open organization leadership assessments. They become triggers.

Learn about open organizations Download resources Join the community What is an open organization? How open is your organization? The Role of 3

One of Markman's key concepts is the Role of 3, which guides both effective learning and effective presentation of information in a way that will be remembered. Markman is talking about getting someone else to change his behavior. This reminds me of my sales seminar in which I wanted to improve (change) the sales associates' selling activities. There is a difference between education, which is just providing knowledge, and training. Training is developing a skill one can use and improve on. Therefore, I had to cut three-quarters of the content and repeat it four times in different ways in my seminars, including role playing. I think what Markman is saying is that stressing just three actions is ideal initially. In my sales training case, my greatest success was role playing product presentations. Not only did the sales people learn the features of the product, but they could talk about them confidently to customers. Afterward, that led to other skills that could be developed.

This Role of 3 applies to you too when wanting to act on something. Imagine a critical business meeting with vital information presented. Suppose you were distracted by jokes or anxiety-provoking rumors (about layoffs, demotions, or inadequate performance). The meeting could be a waste of your time unless you manage your attention on specific issues.

Here is what Markman recommends before, during, and after an important event, to learn three key points: 

1. Prepare: Consider what you want to get out of the event (be it a meeting, presentation, or one-on-one discussion) and what you want to achieve. Consider at most three things. Information connected to your goal is easier to detect and remember. Your mental preparation directs your mind to the information you seek. Psychologists call this advance organizer activity. Consider what will be discussed and review any available materials beforehand.
    
2. Pay attention: This is hard work, particularly when there are distractions. Avoid multitasking on unrelated work (including emails and instant messaging). Working memory is an important concept: Your attention impacts what you will remember later.
    
3. Review: After any critical information-gathering event (a class, meeting, reading a book or article), write down three key points. If you can't write it down, review it in your mind, or record it on your phone or digital recorder. Try to attach what you learned to what you know. Where do they match or conflict?

Suppose you're presenting open organization principles to a group. To make sure they remember those principles and use them, follow these procedures:

1. Start presentations with an agenda and outline for all to review.
2. During the presentation, stay focused primarily on your three critical points. Present all principles, but continually review and highlight three of them.
3. Help people connect the content to what they are doing now and how the principles will improve their activities.
4. Share additional ways the principles can be applied with example use cases and their benefits.
5. End all presentations with a three-point summary. An action plan can be helpful as well.

Say you're presenting the five open organization principles of transparency, collaboration, inclusivity, adaptability, and community. First, you present all of them in basic terms, but the Role of 3 tells you the audience will probably only pick up on three of them, so you focus on transparency, collaboration, and inclusivity.

Here's an example outline, following the Role of 3:

1. Present three key ideas.
   1. Transparency
   2. Collaboration
   3. Inclusivity
2. Organize the presentation by describing each key idea in one sentence.
   1. Transparency is getting as much useful information to other people as possible.
   2. Collaboration is discussing issues with as many other people as appropriate and avoiding making final decisions on your own.
   3. Inclusivity is getting as many different kinds of people involved in a project as appropriate.
3. Develop key idea relationships.
   1. How is transparency related to what people already know? The more transparent you are, the easier it is to collaborate.
   2. How is collaboration related to what people already know, including transparency? If people are doing well with transparency, mention many times that by collaborating more, their transparency will improve.
   3. How is inclusivity related to what people already know, including transparency and inclusivity? The more inclusive we are, the more diverse the ideas generated, leading to more transparency and collaboration.
4. Provide three questions to help people remember and explain the ideas.
   1. When was the last time you paused before deciding something and decided instead to collaborate with all people concerned?
   2. Who do you think would be an easy person to collaborate with?
   3. Each week, how many people do you collaborate with? Should that number be improved upon?

Better for everyone

Now you know what smart thinking is all about. You've learned the Role of 3, and you understand the importance of environment and repetition. These concepts can help you be more productive and happier in whatever you get involved in, including bringing the open organization principles to your own communities.

Use your environment, repetition, and the Role of 3 to enhance your thinking habits.

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The Open Organization What to read next Using habits to practice open organization principles This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License. Register or Login to post a comment.

How to use a circuit breaker pattern for site reliability engineering Robert Kimani Thu, 06/23/2022 - 03:00 Register or Login to like Register or Login to like

Distributed systems have unique requirements for the site reliability engineer (SRE). One of the best ways to maintain site reliability is to enforce a certain set of best practices. These act as guidelines for configuring infrastructure and policies.

What is a circuit breaker pattern?

A circuit breaker pattern saves your service from halting or crashing when another service is not responding.

Image by:

(Robert Kimani, CC BY-SA 40)

For instance, in the example image, the business logic microservices talk to the User Auth service, Account service, and Gateway service.

As you can see, the "engine" of this business application is the business logic microservice. There's a pitfall, though. Suppose the account service breaks. Maybe it runs out of memory, or maybe a back end database goes down. When this happens, the calling microservice starts to have back pressure until it eventually breaks. This results in poor performance of your web services, which causes other components to break. A circuit breaker pattern must be implemented to rescue your distributed systems from this issue.

Implementing a circuit breaker pattern

When a remote service fails, the ideal scenario is for it to fail fast. Instead of bringing down the entire application, run your application with reduced functionality when it loses contact with something it relies upon. For example, keep your application online, but sacrifice the availability of its account service. Making a design like a circuit breaker helps avoids cascading failure.

Here's the recipe for a circuit breaker design:

1. Track the number of failures encountered while calling a remote service.

2. Fail (open the circuit) when a pre-defined count or timeout is reached.

3. Wait for a pre-defined time again and retry connecting to the remote service.

4. Upon successful connection, close the circuit (meaning you can re-establish connectivity to the remote service.) If the service keeps failing, however, restart the counter.

Instead of hanging on to a poorly performing remote service, you fail fast so you can move on with other operations of your application.

More DevOps resources What is DevOps? The ultimate DevOps hiring guide DevOps monitoring tools guide A guide to implementing DevSecOps Download the DevOps glossary eBook: Ansible for DevOps Latest DevOps articles Open source circuit breaker pattern

There are very specific components provided by open source to enable circuit breaker logic in your infrastructure. First, use a proxy layer, such as Istio. Istio is a technology independent solution and uses a  "Blackbox" approach (meaning that it sits outside your application).

Alternately, you can use Hystrix, an open source library from Netflix that's widely and successfully used by many application teams. Hystrix gets built into your code. It's generally accepted that Hystrix can provide more functionality and features than Istio, but it must be "hard coded" into your application. Whether that matters to your application depends on how you manage your code base and what features you actually require.

Implementing effective load balancing

Load balancing is the process of distributing a set of tasks over a set of resources (computing units), with the aim of making their overall processing as efficient as possible. Load balancing can optimize response time, and avoid unevenly overloading some computer nodes while other computer nodes are left idle.

Image by:

(Robert Kimani, CC BY-SA 40)

Users on the left side talk to a virtual IP (vIP) on a load balancer. The load balancer distributes tasks across a pool of systems. Users are not aware of the back-end system, and only interact with the system through the load balancer.

Load balancing helps to ensure high availability (HA) and good performance. High availability means that failures within the pool of servers can be tolerated, such that your services remain available a high percentage of the time. By adding more servers to your pool, effective performance is increased by horizontally spreading the load (this is called horizontal scaling.)

 3 ways to do load balancing

1. DNS Load Balancing: This is the most straight forward and is free. You do not have to purchase any specialized hardware because it's the basic functionality of DNS protocol, you'd simply return multiple A-records An A-record maps a hostname to an IP address. When the DNS server returns multiple IP addresses for a single hostname, the client will choose one IP address at random, in other words the load balancing is automatically done for you from the client.

2. Dedicated Hardware-Based Load Balancer: This is what is typically used within a data center, it's feature-rich and highly performant.

3. When you have a Software Load Balancer, you do not need to have a dedicated hardware for this type of load balancing, you can simply install the load balancer software on commodity hardware and use it for your load balancing use cases.

Nginx and HAProxy are mostly used as software load balancers and can be very useful in development environments where you can quickly spin up their functionality.

DNS load balancing

A DNS server may return multiple IP addresses when a client looks up a hostname. This is because in a large-scale deployment, a network target isn't just running on one server or even just on one cluster. Generally, the client software chooses an IP address at random from the addresses returned. It's not easy to control which IP a client chooses.

Unless you have custom software built to determine the health of a server, pure DNS load balancing doesn't know whether a server is up or down, so a client could be sent to a server that is down.

Clients also cache DNS entries by design, and it's not always easy to clear them. Many vendors offer the ability to choose which datacenter a client gets routed to based on geographic location. Ultimately, an important way to influence how clients reach your services is through load balancing.

Dedicated load balancers

Load balancing can happen at Layer3 (Network), Layer4 (Transport), or Layer7 (Application) of the OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) model.

• An L3 load balancer operates on the source and destination IP addresses.
• An L4 load balancer works with IP and port numbers (using the TCP protocol).
• An L7 load balancer operates at the final layer, the application layer, by making use of the entire payload. It makes use of the entire application data, including the HTTP URL, cookies, headers, and so on. It's able to provide rich functionality for routing. For instance, you can send a request to a particular service based on the type of data that's coming in. For example, when a video file is requested, an L7 load balancer can send that request to a streaming appliance.

There are 5 common load balancing methods in use today:

• Round Robin: This is the simplest and most common. The targets in a load balancing pool are rotated in a loop.
• Weighted Round Robin: Like a round robin, but with manually-assigned importance for the back-end targets.
• Least Loaded or Least Connections: Requests are routed based on the load of the targets reported by the target back-end.
• Least Loaded with Slow Start or Least Response Time: Targets are chosen based on its load, and requests are gradually increased over time to prevent flooding the least loaded back-end.
• Utilization Limit: Based on queries per second (QPS), or events per second (EPS), reported by the back-end.

There are software-based load balancers. This can be software running on commodity hardware.You can pick up any Linux box and install HAProxy or Nginx on it. Software load balancers tend to evolve quickly, as software often does, and is relatively inexpensive.

You can also use hardware-based, purpose-built load balancer appliances. These can be expensive, but they may offer unique features for specialized markets.

Transitioning to Canary-based Deployment

In my previous article, I explained how Canary-based deployments help the SRE ensure smooth upgrades and transitions. The exact method you use for a Canary-based rollout depends on your requirements and environment.

Generally, you release changes on one server first, just to see how the deployed package fares. What you are looking for at this point is to ensure that there are no catastrophic failures, for example, a server doesn't come up or the server crashes after it comes up.

Once that one server deployment is successful, you want to proceed to install it in up to 1% of the servers. Again this 1% is a generic guideline but it really depends on the number of servers you have and your environment. You can then proceed to release for early adaptors if it's applicable in your environment.

Finally, once canary testing is complete, you'd want to release for all users at that point.

Keep in mind that a failed canary is a serious issue. Analyze and implement robust testing processes so that issues like this can be caught during testing phase and not during canary testing.

Reliability matters

Reliability is key, so utilize a circuit breaker pattern to fail fast in a distributed system. You can use Hystrix libraries or Istio.

Design load balancing with a mix of DNS and dedicated load balancers, especially if your application is web-scale. DNS load balancing may not be fully reliable, primarily because the DNS servers may not know which back-end servers are healthy or even up and running.

Finally, you must use canary releases, but remember that a canary is a not a replacement for testing.

Learn what a circuit breaker pattern is, how to implement it, and how to do load balancing.

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Opensource.com

What to read next What you need to know about site reliability engineering How SREs can achieve effective incident response A site reliability engineer's guide to change management This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License. Register or Login to post a comment.

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Tomorrow night, in the skies over Congress Bridge in Austin, Texas, 300 drones will work in concert to provide a lightshow to entertain but also inform about the power of open source software to drive innovation in our world, making an impact in every life, every day.

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Backing up a bit, open source software often conjures up inaccurate visions and presumptions that just aren’t true. No need to conjure those up – we all know what they are. The reality is that open source software (OSS) has transformed our world and become the backbone of our digital economy and the foundation of our digital world. 

The reality is that open source software (OSS) has transformed our world and become the backbone of our digital economy and the foundation of our digital world. 

Some quick, fun facts: 

• In vertical software stacks across industries, open source penetration ranges from 20 to 85 percent of the overall software used
• Linux fuels 90%+ of web servers and Internet-connected devices
• The Android mobile operating system is built on the Linux kernel
• Immensely popular libraries and tools to build web applications, such as: AMP, Appium, Dojo, jQuery, Marko, Node.js and so many more are open source
• The world’s top 100 supercomputers run Linux
• 100% of mainframe customers use Linux
• The major cloud-service providers – AWS, Google, and Microsoft – all utilize open-source software to run their services and host open-source solutions delivered through the cloud

Open source software is about organizations coming together to collectively solve common problems so they can separately innovate and differentiate on top of the common baseline. They see they are better off pooling resources to make the baseline better. Sometimes it is called “coopetition.” It generally means that while companies may be in competition with each other in certain areas, they can still cooperate on others.

I borrowed from a well-known tagline from my childhood in the headline – open source does bring good things to life. 

Fueling Drone Innovation 

Drones were introduced to the world through military applications and then toys we could all easily fly (well, my personal track record is abysmal). But the reality is that drones are seeing a variety of commercial applications, such as energy facility inspection for oil, gas, and solar, search and rescue, firefighting, and more, with new uses coming online all of the time. We aren’t at The Jetsons level yet, but they are making our lives easier and safer (and some really cool aerial shots).

Much of that innovation comes from open source coopetition. 

The Linux Foundation hosts the Dronecode Foundation, which fosters open source code and standards critical to the worldwide drone industry. In a recent blog post, the general manager, Ramón Roche, discusses some of the ways open source has created an ecosystem of interoperability,  which leads to users having more choice and flexibility. 

Building the Foundation

Ramón recounts how it all started with the creation of Pixhawk, open standards for drone hardware, with the goal to make drones fly autonomously using computer vision. Working to overcome the lack of computing power and technology in 2008, Lorenz Meier, then a student, set out to build the necessary flight control software and hardware. Realizing the task’s scale, he sought the help of fourteen fellow students, many of whom were more experienced than him, to make it happen. They built Pixhawk and kick started an open source community around various technologies. It, “enabled talented people worldwide to collaborate and create a full-scale solution that was reusable and standardized. By giving their technology a permissive open source license, they opened it to everyone for use and collaboration.”

Benefits of Openness in the Real World

The innovation and technological backbone we see in drones is thanks to open software, hardware, and standards. Dronecode’s blog has interviews with Max Tubman of Freefly Systems talks about how open standards are enabling interoperability of various payloads amongst partners in the Open Ecosystem. Also, Bobby Watts of Watts Innovation explains the power of standardization and how it has streamlined their interoperability with other ecosystem partners like Gremsy and Drone Rescue Systems.

The innovation and technological backbone we see in drones is thanks to open software, hardware, and standards

Check out both interviews here and read about what is next.

The story of open source driving innovation in the drone industry is just one of thousands of examples of how open source is driving global innovation. Whether you know it or not, you use open source software every minute of every hour of every day.

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