DevOps teams are taught technologies such as Kubernetes, cloud platforms, monitoring, and deployment systems, then often placed on call with little practical preparation for coordinating a serious production incident. Healthcare addresses similar high-pressure problems through defined roles, structured communication, repeated simulations, debriefs, practical assessments, and recertification. Why doesn't production engineering have a comparable, vendor-neutral discipline?
I'm imagining an intensive course where a group of engineers operates a deliberately flawed fictional company with unreliable documentation, confusing access controls, realistic services, monitoring, databases, queues, and deployment systems. Unexpected incidents would occur throughout the week, forcing participants to rotate through roles such as Incident Commander, technical lead, communications lead, scribe, and responder. After each exercise, the group would debrief and improve the environment, processes, runbooks, and monitoring based on what went wrong.
The scenarios could become progressively more difficult, introducing misleading telemetry, cascading failures, conflicting opinions, executive interruptions, and unsafe recovery attempts. The goal would not simply be to identify the broken line of code, but to demonstrate that the team can establish command, coordinate work, manage uncertainty, communicate clearly, and restore service safely. A final practical assessment would place participants in an unfamiliar incident and evaluate how they lead the response.
There are already GameDays, chaos exercises, incident-management frameworks, simulators, and certifications, but I haven't found one cohesive system combining doctrine, human factors, repeated live simulation, role rotation, practical assessment, and recertification. Does a program like this already exist, or is this still an open gap in the industry?
1 Answer
A realistic version of this would be valuable, but it would also be expensive and difficult to build. The training environment would need a large amount of carefully designed infrastructure, scenarios, documentation, failure modes, and facilitation. It would also need constant updating as tools and operational practices change.
The bigger challenge is that every company has its own architecture, access model, culture, and historical problems. A simulation can teach general incident principles, but reproducing the organizational quirks that make real incidents difficult is much harder. Paying eight engineers to spend a week in the course would add another significant cost, so the finished program might be difficult for many organizations to justify even if the training were effective.
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