So the dumpster is on fire. Again. The site’s down. Your boss’s face is an ever-deepening purple. And you begin debating whether you should join the #incident channel or call an ambulance to deal with his impending stroke.

Fires are never going to stop. We’re human. We miss bugs. Or we fat finger a command — deleting dozens of servers and bringing down S3 in US-EAST-1 for hours — effectively halting the internet. These things happen. But we can fundamentally change the way we approach fires. And that requires adopting the techniques of industries much older than ours.

This talk will focus on how firefighters approach a fire — before, during and after an incident — and how we can apply those strategies to our own (admittedly much less dangerous) fires.