As operations folks, dealing with emergencies and disasters is in our blood. I have yet to meet an Ops person that couldn’t recount some war stories about a large scale outage or failure in an environment that they have worked in. In addition to the large scale failures, we generally spend a fair amount of our time fighting fires on a regular basis. As the DevOps movement has taken off one of the bigger things that I have taken away is that we should be looking at other professions and disciplines where they have already solved the issues that we are facing. This is where CERT, and in many ways, more importantly, ICS, come into play.
When I say CERT, many in the community think of US-CERT, the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team. While that is an important CERT, it is not the CERT I will be referring to today. CERT, or Community Emergency Response Team falls under the FEMA (Federal Emergency Managment Agency) program called Citizens Corps. Semantics aside, CERT is there to empower citizens to be able to sustain themselves after a large scale disaster where they may be without government support for possibly 72 hrs or more. At CERT’s core there is a 20 hr course that teaches:
- Disaster Preparedness
- Fire Safety (which includes actual training and usage of a fire extinguisher)
- Disaster Medical Operations
- First Aid
- Triage
- Light Search and Rescue
- How to assess whether or not to enter a building
- Cribbing
- Basic search techniques
- Incident Command System
- Disaster Psychology
Enough of the sales pitch, why does this matter to the average Ops person? First off, many of us, while not first responders, are responsible for the critical infrastructure that makes things work. Whether it is the networking that make everything possible, or the web presence that needs to be maintained so municipalities can order the supplies needed to begin dealing with the disaster, there are all sorts of ways that we as Ops folks are needed in a disaster. We do what we can to prep for disasters at work, why not do the same at home?
Then there is the way this applies in the office. Beyond the basics of knowing how to use the fire extinguisher or knowing how to get that row of servers off your buddy when they fell over during an earthquake, there are some real lessons to be learned from the Incident Command System or ICS. ICS was developed by the fire service to handle dealing with scaling resources during an incident. ICS scales from a small brush fire all the way to incidents as large as Hurricane Katrina. The Incident Command System lays the foundation for being able to deal with large scale and small scale issues. It deals with the questions of:
- Who’s in charge?
- How does interaction between different teams happen?
- How do we get more resources?
In his talk, GameDay: Creating Resiliency Through Destruction at LISA 2011, Jesse Robbins (@jesserobbins) talks about how during his time at Amazon, he essentially took the Incident Command System and substituted the Command for Management to come up with their procedures on how to deal with incidents. CERT gives the basic intro to ICS and then you can add on (or start with if you like) courses from the FEMA Emergency Management Institute Independent Study Program. In general, IS-100 and IS-200 are the suggested starting points.
Hopefully I have convinced you that CERT is a worthwhile investment of 20 hrs. In case I haven’t, there are a few other things worth knowing. This is generally free and usually you walk away with a bag of personal gear to get you started. Thats right, there is SWAG involved and its not just a t-shirt. But really, this is something we should all be doing to be good citizens. The career building aspects are just an awesome win.
CERT Classes and Programs
- California
- Oregon
- Washington State
- New York
- Texas
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