Comparison
MitigationvsRemediation
Mitigation
you failed over to the other region at 02:40 and went back to bed with the bug still there.
An action that reduces or removes the impact without fixing the underlying cause. It is the correct goal during an incident, and confusing it with a fix is how people stay up until dawn chasing a root cause with customers still affected. A mitigation deployed and then forgotten is its own risk, which is why the follow-up work is tracked separately and explicitly.
Full entry →Remediation
the actual fix shipped nine days after the incident, once someone had understood the race.
The work that removes the underlying cause so the failure cannot recur in the same way. It happens after the incident, on a normal schedule, with review and tests — which is precisely why it must not be attempted while the site is down. The distinction from mitigation is the most practically useful pair of words in incident response, because it tells you what you are allowed to care about right now.
Full entry →