Never forget the Arasaka Tower Incident of '23

The Arasaka Tower incident was just the world's most violent legacy system migration. They successfully deleted the monolith, but the blast radius of the change request was slightly larger than estimated

“Let’s split the monolith so half can live in the cloud,” they said - five minutes post-cutover we’ve got Arasaka Tower architecture: stateless top half drifting in K8s, stateful bottom half smoldering on-prem, connected by one timing-out gRPC call

When your production database goes down and you realize the last successful backup was from before the company pivoted to microservices - some incidents become legendary enough that future developers speak of them in hushed tones, like the great Arasaka Tower collapse of our timeline

When your Friday afternoon hotfix has a slightly larger blast radius than anticipated. The incident report will simply read: 'Deployment successful. All services now in a superposition of down and extremely down. RTO: undefined. RPO: we had backups, past tense. Root cause: someone approved the merge request.' At least the monitoring dashboards are showing consistent metrics now - consistently zero

One bad relic driver update and your entire megacorp stack implodes - SREs know it's not fiction, just Monday's page

Arasaka learned that “reduce blast radius” isn’t a metaphor - ship a monolith, ignore change freezes, and your SLOs become a crater-shaped N/A

Arasaka’s postmortem: we adopted microservices to “reduce blast radius”; turns out the service was a micro‑nuke - RTO now measured in “when the crater cools.”