Incident management, by the very nature of the beast, is never clean. It’s noisy, confusing, fraught with danger, and full of people with strong opinions on the best way to resolve the issues. Which, coincidentally, is also the opening of Borderlands (you can pick your favorite in the franchise—they are all relevant).

Borderlands is one long, barely-contained disaster, a futuristic world that’s broken down, with science gone mad, and the heroes improvising solutions. If that doesn’t sound like a war room during a Severity-1 outage, I don’t know what is (if you know, you know).

Beneath the chaos, however, there is a method to the madness, a rough wisdom about how to survive and thrive when everything’s gone awry and there is a hoard of angry customers demanding to know what’s happening and how you will fix it.

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As anyone who knows me can tell you, I am a very proud West Country resident. Yorkshire may be god’s own country, but the West Country is the heart; it’s old, wild, and where nature and legend meet to form a magical, mystical region. Where else can you find a giant horse carved into the hillside, an ancient druid monument, and Camelot? Nothing is more West Country than The Wurzels (except maybe scrumpy). While listening to some of their songs recently, I thought to myself: Is there any way I can combine my love of The Wurzels with my love of technology? And so, this article was born.

In the world of technology and DevOps, with the need and desire to constantly go faster, it’s easy to forget the simple, foundational principles that make systems work efficiently. Oddly enough, I found my most important lessons in these principles not in conferences or the latest shiny tool, but listening to the great and legendary band The Wurzels.

For those who are unfamiliar (and I don’t know why you would be), The Wurzels, best known for their song, “The Combine Harvester,” sing about the joys, trials, and tribulations of rural life, often with a good dose of humour. Their music, on the surface, seems worlds away from continuous delivery, idempotent configuration, and immutable infrastructure. Yet, their most popular songs reveal four core DevOps truths.