When you see it you'll shit bricks

That's not a tirefire, THIS is a tirefire.

Melbourne industrial fire in pictures

The APAC Timezone Problem

Running infrastructure that serves Australian users from anywhere else in the world means your on-call rotation is getting paged at 3am for what is, on the east coast of Australia, a completely ordinary Tuesday afternoon. The inverse is also true: your Australian colleagues, running their own infrastructure, are handling the morning peak load while your US team is asleep, and when something breaks at 9am Sydney time the escalation path leads to someone's phone in California at 4pm the day before, which is its own kind of temporal confusion.

This is not a complaint. It is a structural feature of a planet that is round and continues to rotate regardless of your deployment schedule. The teams that handle it well treat APAC as a first-class operational concern rather than an afterthought. The teams that don't handle it well have a Slack channel called #apac-issues that nobody in APAC is awake to read.

@mattray and the Ecosystem

Australian ops engineers punched well above their weight in the Puppet and Chef ecosystems. Matt Ray was part of that cohort — the people who showed up at PuppetConf and ChefConf and were building real infrastructure automation before most of the audience had heard of it. The community was small enough that everyone knew everyone, large enough that the tools got real production use, and located far enough from Silicon Valley to have healthy skepticism about the hype cycle.

That skepticism is an Australian export. It doesn't show up in the tech stack documentation but it does show up in the postmortems, which tend to be more direct about what actually happened and less concerned with protecting anyone's feelings about it.

The Literal Tirefire

The Melbourne industrial fire linked above is not metaphor. It is a photo essay about an actual large-scale fire at an actual industrial facility in an actual Australian city. Australia has these with some regularity. The continent is large, dry, and contains a significant amount of stored combustible material at any given time. When an industrial fire starts, it produces smoke plumes visible from space, closes roads across a region, and occasionally forces the evacuation of facilities that happened to be nearby.

The reason this page exists on a site called tirefi.re is that the metaphor and the literal thing are occasionally the same event. Sometimes infrastructure fails because of distributed systems complexity. Sometimes it fails because there is an actual fire. The postmortem template covers both. The contributing factors section will need more room for the second one.