Editor's Note: This blog post was contributed by Michael Wilde, director of sales engineering at Honeycomb.
DevOps, observability, continuous delivery (CD), test in production, chaos engineering and software ownership are all major themes in software development today; but why? In an ideal world, we get everything right the first time, nothing breaks, no one DDOS' us, and the weather report is “Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs .” Reality, of course, is different - and better, to be honest. The dynamic nature of customers, a changing landscape, competition and an incredible pace of change has made software developers probably the most highly demanded resource inside an organization. Plus, we get to innovate and build awesome stuff!
The job of software engineering and managing production systems operations is a challenging one - partly because of so many moving parts and lack of shared insights into those parts. The only way to code with any real confidence is to know and observe how what you build is behaving in production, driving your decisions based on real-world information. It's hard to be a competent and responsive software owner if you spend time guessing how your changes will behave and when something goes wrong, speculating how to fix it.
In the words of Brian Dawson , a DevOps evangelist from CloudBees, “To do DevOps right, an organization needs to build multiple bridges – linking people, processes, tools and organizational goals.” To code with confidence you need observability in the highest order.
Shared insights are critical to linking people, process, and tools, ensuring all functional teams have the information and understanding they need to make the “right” decision, do better, and be better. As management consultant Peter Drucker stated, “You can’t improve what you can’t measure.” In the modern DevOps movement, observability is emerging as a requirement for building those bridges.
The team at Honeycomb is leading the observability movement. We're focused on helping developers and ops teams gain the most amount of visibility to the source of production issues in the fastest time. We know that the process of software development greatly improves through instrumentation and distributed tracing. Honeycomb Beelines are an excellent and easy way to automatically increase production system observability helping you to find the toughest problems in literally seconds. When a continuous delivery (CD) pipeline completes a build or deploy, a Honeycomb timeline marker can be created so operators are aware of significant external events in their production systems. Additionally, build and test pipelines can be instrumented and monitored in Honeycomb to shed light on what steps may be slowing a build or test. Fast moving teams employing feature flags are able to test in production and become more proactive by investigating how things are doing before they break.
Continuous integration (CI), CD and DevOps are fundamentally about fast feedback loops, ensuring you and your teams are continuously armed with information and insights. With Honeycomb and CloudBees solutions the feedback loop becomes tighter, latency lowers, problems are easier to find and developers can code with confidence.
To learn more about how observability can help you come join myself and Brian from CloudBees on February 6th at 10:00 a.m. PST for our Coding with Confidence webinar where we'll talk about DevOps, continuous delivery, observability, CloudBees and Honeycomb.