Sign In

Casey Rosenthal

CEO and cofounder of Verica

Casey Rosenthal is the CEO and co-founder of Verica, a company known for its focus on chaos engineering and system resiliency. He has held this position since January 2019, leading initiatives to enhance software reliability through innovative engineering practices.1

Professional Background

  • Previous Roles:
    • Engineering Manager at Netflix (2015-2018), where he managed the Traffic and Chaos teams, focusing on system reliability and performance.
    • CTO at Backplane (2018), where he developed an edge traffic management platform.
    • Vice President of Professional Services at Snapflow (2014-2015), where he improved client relationships and team performance.
    • General Manager of Professional Services at Basho Technologies (2011-2014), overseeing operations for distributed database systems.1

Education

Casey holds a degree from Ohio University, which has contributed to his extensive knowledge in technology and engineering.1

Contributions

Rosenthal is recognized for defining chaos engineering, a discipline aimed at improving system resilience by intentionally introducing failures to test system robustness. His work has significantly influenced how organizations approach software reliability and fault tolerance.1

In addition to his role at Verica, he serves on the board of directors for Trifork and has been involved with various organizations advising on technical trends and business strategies.1

Highlights

Jul 20 · linkedin

If you are trying to make sense of this morning's CrowdStrike incident, the first thing to understand is that the global outage that followed is not the fault of an individual software engineer. The amount of software applications, tools, features, platforms, and various other tech required to make these things work is way beyond what a human can fit in their head. It is a level of complexity that exceeds human comprehension, and I mean that literally.

No matter how good you are at driving, you can't predict a traffic accident. And if you could predict a traffic accident -- if you saw it coming -- you would swerve or do something different to make sure the accident didn't happen. That's what it feels like to be a software engineer on call for a critical software system operating at scale.

If you have a litigious or socio-psychological need to point a finger, point it at the CEO or perhaps even the Board of Directors. An organization can choose to invest in safety, or not. That's an executive decision. You can invest in Chaos Engineering. You can invest in deployment canaries with limited blast radius. You can invest in quality assurance. If you don't, that's the fault of the organization, not any one individual who is trying to hold things together while delivering value to customers in a fast-paced, competitive environment.

Some people will call for regulation. Will that help? Not at all. Companies already have a huge financial incentive to stay online. CrowdStrike is being punished for this outage by their customers and by the market. Their reputation will suffer from this incident. Adding a bureaucratic mechanism to inflict additional punishment will not materially affect the motivation and certainly not the outcome.

The financial motivation to be reliable already exists. What regulation would do is punish small companies that can't afford the liability and reward large companies that can easily pass that cost on to customers and dilute it through insurance policies. I'm normally pro-regulation, but in this case it would clearly sacrifice innovation for a false sense of security.

What would help? Change the conversation. Stop talking about blame, root causes, and quantitative measurements (looking at you, MTTR.) Talk instead about sociotechnical systems, organizational dynamics, identifying knowledge gaps, establishing internal learning communities, and qualitative measurements of a quality. Organizations that do that well, have better systems.

If you are interested in this topic, check out Courtney Nash's https://lnkd.in/eUf5AqJE work over at the VOID https://thevoid.community/.

Related Questions

What is Verica's main focus and product offerings?
How did Casey Rosenthal get involved in Chaos Engineering?
What are some notable achievements of Casey Rosenthal in his career?
How did Casey Rosenthal's role at Netflix influence his career path?
What is the significance of Prowler in the AWS security landscape?
Casey Rosenthal
Casey Rosenthal, photo 1
Casey Rosenthal, photo 2
Add to my network

Experience

CEO and cofounder of Verica
Prowler, Erlang Solutions, International Institute for Analytics, Cloud Conformity, Netflix, Basho Technologies Inc

Education

Ohio University

Location

San Francisco Bay Area