About

chaotic-monkey.com is a writing site about infrastructure — the parts that fail, the parts that are held together by a workaround somebody applied during an incident three years ago, and the parts that work so well nobody remembers they are there.

It is operated by DevOps Team, a fractional DevOps, ITOps and SecOps practice for product companies. The writing here comes out of that work: the recurring shapes of failure that turn up across a lot of different systems, and the received wisdom about them that turns out to be conditional.

What is here

Some Monkey News — the main line. Pieces on distributed systems, delivery pipelines, elastic compute and the debugging rituals that grow up around all three. Comic titles, real subject matter.

AI Agents — agents that plan, decide and act, considered as an operations problem rather than a capabilities one. Permissions, blast radius, specification gaming, and what gets lost when software hands work to other software.

Blast Radius — twice-weekly analysis assembled from published engineering writing, drafted by an automated pipeline and reviewed before it appears. It says so on every page, and Crash Safely explains exactly how it works and what it is not allowed to do.

The house style

The titles are jokes. The contents are not.

That distinction is deliberate and it is load-bearing. A monkey throwing exceptions is a good headline; a made-up outage at a named company presented as something we witnessed would be a lie, and the fact that the surrounding page is funny would not make it less of one. So the comedy lives in the register — in how things are said — and never in the claims.

In practice that means a short list of things you will not find here. No invented incidents. No metrics presented as our own measurements, because this site measures nothing: it is a writing site, not a monitoring product. No latency figures, uptime percentages or MTTR numbers offered as facts about systems we have not run. Where a number appears, it belongs to a source and is credited to it in the same sentence.

It also means no product rankings and nothing for sale. The footer used to advertise a shop. There was never anything in it.

Getting in touch

There is a chat widget on every page, and it reaches a real person rather than a bot. Corrections are genuinely welcome — if something here is wrong, saying so is a favour.

Everything published is in the feed: no account, no newsletter, no tracking beyond the analytics that count visits.