In this preso he's focusing in on just one aspect of how Flickr does things. He did a more wide-ranging talk with ops guru John Allspaw last year.

http://velocityconference.blip.tv/file/2284377

For instance, as people noted already, he's advocating testing features on live servers -- in a controlled way. This doesn't work unless you have the kind of dev/ops cooperation that he describes in the above video, as well as practices for quickly rolling back changes and a culture of not blaming people.