In my day we used to develop "Disaster Recovery" programs. They were massive, and we tested on a regular basis including renting massive systems from IBM and flying the team to the IBM data center to run a full restore of everything. End business users had to login afterwards and sign off.
I understand we "live in a different world" is the favorite motto these days. But do we really? If anything data is bigger, more complex, not in one place, you can't just ship a truck load of tapes and three people somewhere to test.
IMHO the more we try to reinvent technology the more we realize some of the things we all felt were weighing us down were actually smart ideas brought on not by fear but by real life experience.
And the pendulum will swing once more here and back again at some point in the future.
I don't recognise the 'different world' you describe. Practiced disciplined DR is a key part of modern software engineering at large and small companies across the startup/enterprise spectrum (in my experience). The popularity of tools like Netflix's Chaos Monkey/Gorilla/Kong server as testament to that.
That's not to say all companies do it (it seems GitLab didn't) but the tone of your comment doesn't reflect a lot of people's experiences.
I think the key is knowing that this is routine at a subset of shops while most others are winging it to various degrees — and always has been.
If you worked at a responsible place decades ago you might be aghast at what happens at a random sampling of companies now, but the same would have been true at a random sampling decades ago. The difference is that unless you were a customer or the outage was especially prominent you probably never would have heard about it.
I understand we "live in a different world" is the favorite motto these days. But do we really? If anything data is bigger, more complex, not in one place, you can't just ship a truck load of tapes and three people somewhere to test.
IMHO the more we try to reinvent technology the more we realize some of the things we all felt were weighing us down were actually smart ideas brought on not by fear but by real life experience.
And the pendulum will swing once more here and back again at some point in the future.