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• Overview of the backend infrastructure for storing events, including Kafka, retriever nodes, S3, Lambda jobs, and API interactions |
• Use of Kafka as a storage engine |
• Comparison with Kinesis and outsourcing vs running in-house |
• Managing and updating Kafka clusters |
• Performance characteristics of storing data on SSDs and S3 |
• Monitoring and testing Honeycomb using internal "dogfood" cluster |
• Automated deployment process to kibble, dogfood, and production environments |
• Importance of acknowledging human fallibility and optimizing for learning |
• Importance of building systems that make it easy for engineers to write code quickly |
• Characteristics of a high-performing team, including ability to ship often and focus on new problems |
• Benefits of joining a high-performing team vs trying to improve an existing one |
• Role of engineering managers in creating healthy teams and pushing back against short-sighted approaches |
• Unhealthy power dynamics between product people and engineers, and importance of triad-based relationships |
• Healthy relationship between money flow and priorities, including considering long-term investment and employee well-being |
• Importance of uninterrupted focus for engineers |
• Measuring happiness and health of engineering teams through surveys and open communication |
• Human element in software development, treating engineers as people not machines |
• Observability and CI/CD pipelines for improving team performance |
• Book "Observability Engineering" and its free early release |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So in 2020, 16th of June, I reached out, I've sent you a direct message, and it read like this: "Hi. I can't make headspace for our conversation at the moment. Will ping when I'm done with current work in progress and have loaded necessary context to make it worthwhile. Liking your recent tweets, by t... |
17 months later, I think that mindshare is getting even more traction, if that was possible. I think it was expected, but I really liked where the whole observability landscape has shifted, and you, Charity, and your team, made a massive contribution to that. |
**Charity Majors:** Yeah. That's very sweet of you. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** You gave lots of great talks, lots of great presentations, and I think this will be another one. We'll see how it goes. That's my hope. That's my intention. |
**Charity Majors:** Cool. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So I know that you get asked this question a lot, but I think it's important that we start here. What is observability? |
**Charity Majors:** Well, it comes from the mechanical engineering and control systems theory, and the definition of observability - it's the mathematical tool of controllability, and it means how much can you understand about any internal system state just by looking at it from the outside. |
So if we extrapolate that to computers, I think a lot of interesting things flow from it, and it's increasingly relevant. It used to be that we had a load balancer, the app, and the database. And you could pretty much predict most of the ways the system was gonna fail; it repeated itself over and over. Nowadays, people... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So instrumenting your code - that is a really important one. Would you say that you would need to instrument your code every time you need to observe an aspect of it? |
**Charity Majors:** The point of it is that you shouldn't have to add new code to observe it. That's part of the point. If you've got enough context, you should be able to slice and dice and ask new questions without shipping custom code. Because adding custom code implies that you knew in advance what you needed to lo... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So the code, in a way, it needs to expose some information about how it runs... |
**Charity Majors:** You want to gather any information you happen to know about the parameters that were passed in, or the runtime environment, the language internals, the container, the systems environment, as well as -- you wanna wrap automatically and store any HTTP calls, you wanna store the amount of time it took,... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I find it really interesting how you keep mentioning things which make business sense; they are typically related to the problem that your application or your code is trying to solve. What you're not saying is CPU, memory, disk. That's very interesting. Why is that? |
**Charity Majors:** I feel like we're seeing a bit of a divergence. I think that monitoring tools, things that are metrics-based, are the right tool for the job when it comes to understanding your infrastructure. If you're reflective of the service, "Is this service healthy?" But that's a very different question from "... |
Now, I do think that the observability, from the perspective of your code - I think there are a couple of metrics that are probably useful to software engineers. You do wanna know if you just shipped a change and your memory usage tripled. You do wanna know if you just shipped a change and your CPU suddenly saturated. ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So the way I hear it, it's almost like the end user experience, what makes them happy, what makes them sad. |
**Charity Majors:** \[08:10\] It's a radical perspective shift from the perspective of the service, to the perspective of the user. Another way to think of this is "Well, we blew up the monolith..." It used to be you had a monolith, and if all else failed you could attach GDB and you could just step through it, right? ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So that to me sounds a lot like what the microservice architecture would advocate for. You have lots of microservices, you have-- |
**Charity Majors:** You're pretty much screwed if you don't have something like this and you're running microservices, yeah. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Right. So this is very important for microservices. What about serverless? |
**Charity Majors:** Absolutely. In fact, I will often tell people that the right way to think about instrumenting your code in the future is just imagine you're running serverless. Because you might not have access to all of the underlying infrastructure. All you have access to is what can you tell through the lens of ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Interesting. So if you do have a monolith, what do you do? Can you still use the observability that you mention about? |
**Charity Majors:** Absolutely. It's never not easier to have observability tools... I feel like though when you're asking someone to radically change the way they do things, or adopt a new tool, what you're offering them needs to be an order of magnitude better than what they've got. For some monoliths, it is. For som... |
So you should never embrace change for the sake of change, or complexity for the sake of complexity. If what you have is working for you, more power to you. The problem is that for so many of us it's almost like falling off a cliff. It's very discontinuous; when the old solutions stop working for you, they really stop ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Right, that makes sense. Going back a little bit to the users - I think that is very important, because all of a sudden, being able to see or visualize in a way the journey that the user takes through your app, and what that entails through your app, I think that is very powerful. And being able to un... |
**Charity Majors:** Yes. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** But also, extrapolating that to all your users. |
**Charity Majors:** Yes. If it's broken for this user, who else is it broken for? Absolutely. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** And I like that perspective, because that can work equally well for development teams. So we often think that our end users are the only ones that benefit from the code. But a lot of the time, the development teams spend a lot more time with the code, wrestling it, fixing it, debugging it, whatever ne... |
**Charity Majors:** Well, the best engineers I've ever worked with are the ones who will have one window up with their IDE and another window up with their observability tool, and they're just constantly -- they're entering a conversation with their code as it's live in production. |
So observability isn't a magical fairy solution in and of itself. There are other important components here that work in synchrony. I think that CI/CD, having a really healthy CI/CD pipeline is a really important part of this, because when you're writing code, you have all that context in your brain, it's fresh; you kn... |
\[12:12\] And so having a CI/CD pipeline where once you merge your changes to main it automatically picks it up, runs tests and deploys within 15 minutes (that's a good upper bound), and very importantly, it deploys only your changes. If it's small, it's compact, it's a few minutes, then you can ship one engineer's cha... |
When you're merging your changes and you're pretty sure that at some point in the next 12 to 72 hours your changes and anywhere from 0 to 15 other people's changes are going to be shipped, nobody's gonna look at it. So you've severed that tight, virtuous feedback loop of ownership. |
I'd also like to point -- you know, Facebook did some great research earlier this year that showed from the moment when you're writing code and you write a bug, the amount of cost and time and pain etc. goes up exponentially when it comes to fixing that bug, the longer it gets. You've written it, you can backspace and ... |
So observability is what allows you to take your microscope out and compare at the level of the pull request, what is different about the request? I have this build ID, with these changes, with this instrumentation... And once you can see it, it's so easy to fix. Fixing bugs is not hard; finding the bugs is hard, right... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yes. It's always that one character change, or the one line change. And the hardest bugs - that's exactly what it is, where you just reorder a line, and guess what - it starts working again. Nobody knows why. Don't touch it. That's what typically happens. |
**Charity Majors:** The hard part is finding where in the system is the bug that you need to fix. And knowing that there's a bug in the first place. And these are the things that observability is so well-positioned to do for you, because it speaks the language of endpoints, and variables, and not the language of low-le... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I think the term "observability" is overloaded, overused... |
**Charity Majors:** Well, it is now... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** It is now, right? Not when you started, right? |
**Charity Majors:** I planted my flag on it! That was my word. |
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