Pioneering AI-Driven fire prevention

Operating at this level of responsibility requires unprecedented coordination to keep systems running at all times. When lives depend on the systems that you deploy, any point of friction creates a rippling effect potentially putting people's lives in danger.

These hurdles can be hard to overcome when the margin of error is razor thin requires more than just robust infrastructure. It requires a fundamental shift in how teams approach production deployments.

Beyond Tribal Knowledge

When teams are small, institutional knowledge is manageable. Someone nearby always has the answer. But when your team's actions touch numerous interconnected services, production deployments become a coin flip rather than routine.

Possessing a deep understanding of the infrastructure dependencies, but not documenting them anywhere, shouldn't be the status quo. It's a recipe to creating deployment bottlenecks more than anything else, and it will eventually catch up to you.

High stake deployments

This challenge is most acute in industries where downtime directly impacts an organization financially, operationally, and reputationally.

The trap many organizations fall into, especially at scale, is concentrating infrastructure knowledge within a single person who must review all high-stakes changes.

Whiskerlabs regularly performs high-stakes deployments, given the nature of its product and infrastructure. A single misconfigured security group or database change could affect the trust of millions of lives. Such high-stakes decisions cannot depend on an engineer's availability or mental state at any given moment.

What drew in Whiskerlabs was the proposition that institutional knowledge could be democratized and made available to everyone within the organization.

Teams often choose tools that satisfy immediate needs or default to the same undocumented knowledge patterns they were accustomed to, without considering long-term implications or negative effects on other workflows.

Adoption

Whiskerlabs needed a tool that could increase the velocity of how they build whilst providing full visibility across their infrastructure.

Initial trial · W1

During the initial week of adoption it was crucial to build the trust among their engineers regarding Overmind, especially since they had already tried numerous SRE tools. We got the ship sailing by simulating their previous changes that caused an outage to see if we could've prevented them.

We managed to spot 100% of the changes that previously broke their infrastructure in just a few minutes it took to calculate the Blast Radius and assert the potential risks.

Overmind excels in risk evaluation, preventing issues before they arise.

Full adoption · W2

Within just two weeks of implementation, teams achieved a 200% increase in successful, non-breaking production deployments, up from 33% in the prior period.

Whiskerlabs's leadership recognized that a paper trail is only useful when infrastructure is down. A preventive measure can potentially render reactive deploy strategies useless.

Mandatory workflow check · W4

Once word got out, everyone started integrating Overmind in their workflow, so much so that adoption spread rapidly throughout the organization, becoming the second mandatory check within the organization.

Currently, Snyk is the only additional mandatory check for production deployments and as of the time of writing this article, Whiskerlabs's usage of Overmind remains at 100%. The platform proved there's a better way, one through which engineers can innovate boldly, deploy faster, and protect what matters most.

Where Overmind wins

Most startups in the space are focused on providing a paper trail when an outage occurs. Overmind focuses on prevention. Imagine a system that can simulate your change and it's rippling effects before you decide to merge.

At Whiskerlabs, a culture open to adopting new tools combined with a solution built specifically for preventing outages culminated in a powerful workflow. The result: reduced time between deployments while dramatically increasing confidence in what's being deployed.

Fewer delays and less scrambling to fix things last minute.

We intentionally designed Overmind so that it stops you when a deployment can potentially cause an outage and will cheer from the sideline when a change is safe to proceed.

For Whiskerlabs, this means engineers can move quickly without sacrificing reliability, and infrastructure knowledge is no longer locked away in a few key individuals.

Conclusion

The best tools aren't the ones that do the most things, but the ones that help people work faster naturally. As Whiskerlabs continues to protect homes, families and communities, they're finding that the key to moving fast has less to do with having more horsepower, and more to do with having confidence in the systems they build.

With Overmind, that confidence is built into every deployment.