This blog’s title is “Managing Organized Complexity”. The title is borrowed from Alex Ryan’s “What is a systems approach?“:
The domain of systems theory does not cover all systems – it was never intended as a theory of everything. In 1948, Weaver noted that between mechanics and statistical mechanics, there was an absence of mathematical techniques for treatment of systems with medium number of components, whose behavior could be much more varied than simple machines or very large ensembles. Weaver gave a name to the systems in this gap, saying that “one can refer to this group of problems as organized complexity”.
Because this is what we Systems Administrators and DevOps do: We manage systems that are complex enough, do work and sometimes fail. Our role is to minimize failure and downtime. This is called homeostasis.
In a previous lifetime, when I was a Postmaster, this blog was called blog.postmaster.gr. The old links should still work.
Managing organized complexity 