The Space Shuttle was the most advanced machine ever designed. It was a triumph and a marvel of the modern world.

And on January 1986, shuttle Challenger disintegrated seconds after launch.This session will discuss how and why the disaster occurred and what lessons modern DevOps and Site Reliability Engineers can learn.

The Challenger disaster was not only a failure of the technology, but a failure of the engineering and management culture in NASA. While engineers were aware of problems in the technology stack, there was no conception of the risks they actually posed to the spacecraft. Management had shifted the focus from “prove that it’s safe to launch” to “prove that it’s unsafe to stop the launch”.

This session will present the risk analysis (or lack thereof) of the Shuttle program and draw parallels to modern software development. In the end, launching a shuttle is an extremely complex deployment to the cloud… and above it.