THE VIDEO SHELF · storage and firmware reliability
Zebras All the Way Down - Bryan Cantrill, Uptime 2017
Bryan Cantrill's Uptime 2017 talk on the engineering challenges of the stateful data path, including storage, firmware and hardware bugs. It uses the 'zebras vs. horses' diagnostic heuristic to explain why rare failures keep appearing.
Why HN readers recommended it
A perennial HN favorite whenever firmware, disks, ECC or opaque hardware come up, valued as both entertaining and sobering.
This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.
Video & recommendation details
- Creator / channel
- Code & Supply
- Topic
- storage and firmware reliability
- Format
- talk
- Level
- intermediate
- HN recommenders in dataset
- 6
- HN mentions in dataset
- 18
- Recommendation years in dataset
- 2018–2025
These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.
From the original HN conversations
Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.
Zebras All the Way Down - Bryan Cantrill, Uptime 2017 [VIDEO] Lots of great tangents that add to the subjects. I love talks like this.
gt2 on Hacker News · 2018-10
In Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?One of my favorite conference talks is semi related to problems like this. [VIDEO] Brian Cantrill - Zebras all the way down
ar0b on Hacker News · 2018-10
In iPhones are allergic to heliumOn this topic (and related in many ways) is Bryan Cantrill's talk Zebras All the way Down.[1] The gist is that in medicine there's the concept of diseases that are zebras and horses, rare and common, and the saying goes "when you hear hoof beats …
kbenson on Hacker News · 2019-07
In Replacing a silently failing disk in a ZFS pool
Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.