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**Gerhard Lazu:** You had quite a bit of time to think about it, and I really like the alternatives that you came up with, which - I think they all mean observability. One that really stood out to me is being curious in production. What happens in your production? How do yo know what is going on? And obviously, product... |
**Charity Majors:** Right. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[15:58\] And I think property testing and fuzzing help with it somewhat, but not at scale. You can't generate production scale. It's impossible. |
**Charity Majors:** You've just basically gotta accept that all the interesting bugs are only gonna happen in production. There's no such thing as a staging environment that matches production. It doesn't exist. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I love that. I love that. And I think that's why you should push directly to production... On a Friday. The day doesn't matter really. It's just a day. What if it's Saturday? Does it matter? |
**Charity Majors:** Well, if you're using feature flags, then it shouldn't matter... Right? If you're using a feature flag... Like, decoupling deploys from releases is one of the most powerful things you can do for reliability. I love the phrase that the Intercom folks came up with, which is that shipping is the heartb... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Any day, every day, it doesn't really matter. As long as you're shipping... |
**Charity Majors:** Right? A lot of people get worked up about the phrase "testing in production", but in fact we all do it. The only question is "Do you admit you do it?" and "Do you try to build guardrails so that you do it safely or not?" Because I agree, testing in production, if you don't have tests, if you don't ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's right. |
**Break**: \[17:35\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So I think we're both agreeing that shipping into production is very important. Anything before that - you can do it, sure. Why? Ask yourself. If you have-- |
**Charity Majors:** Code that isn't in production is dead code. It doesn't matter, it doesn't exist. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Right. So that's the first one. The second one is you want that time to be as short as possible. I think anything under 15 minutes is good, but what I'm wondering is why 15 minutes. |
**Charity Majors:** Totally arbitrary. \[laughs\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Right. |
**Charity Majors:** \[20:01\] Just the longer it gets, the more pathologies start to creep in; you're entering this sort of death spiral of it takes longer, so you need bigger diffs, so code review takes longer, you start to ship multiple changes from multiple people at a time, so you decouple-- you know, it's just bad... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Right. |
**Charity Majors:** And that time is not being spent on -- it's the worst parts of engineering; it's the waiting on each other, and the trying to find the bugs someone else wrote... Engineering can be such a wonderful, beautiful, creative, fantastic profession, but only if you're in a high-performing team that can spen... |
I think Intercom - again, they're some of my favorite people, but they ship in 15 or less, and they have a Ruby on Rails monolith. \[laughs\] If you're using Golang or something, you have no excuse. Anyone can get it done in 15 minutes. 5 minutes or less - that's trickier. I don't think that's achievable for everyone a... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I think this feels to me very related to testing. You don't want your tests to take more than some number of minutes... And if they do - well, how many changes can you push to your repository if you have to wait an hour, two hours to know whether you haven't broken anything? |
**Charity Majors:** Yeah. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I think this is very similar, but maybe more important, because this also includes the tests. You would obviously want your tests to run within these 15 minutes, and then have your code deployed. So I think there is some sense there. But also, I think even shipping may be an overloaded term. Like, wha... |
**Charity Majors:** If you have to ship a one-line change, how long would it take you to get that out? For a lot of companies, they haven't prioritized it, and it literally takes them hours to do a one-line change, and that to me is just unspeakable. The thing is, even companies who take an hour to make the change, alm... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Let's take our example. Changelog.com is a monolithic application. It's a Phoenix-based app; think of it like Ruby on Rails. It's using a PostgreSQL database, it has NGINX in front - this is Ingress NGINX, it's running on Kubernetes, and there's a load balancer in front, and there's a CDN in front as ... |
**Charity Majors:** \[24:04\] What language are you using? |
**Gerhard Lazu:** What language? It's Elixir. |
**Charity Majors:** Yeah, you should install the Honeycomb OpenTelemetry instrumentation into your application, and then that'll give you out of the box -- it automatically wraps HTTP and database calls and all this stuff... And then you might want to, at some point, go in and add some amount of tracing. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So the tracing is like the custom stuff, where we care about specific calls being made, how long they take, stuff like that. |
**Charity Majors:** Yes. Which is optional, but it's really handy when you're trying to figure out where your time is going, or concurrency problems, or stuff like that. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. So that was just like one step - install it, and that's it. I like that. That sounds really good. That's super-simple. Very interesting. And how would we visualize the data? So our app starts emitting those events... What happens next? |
**Charity Majors:** You go to Honeycomb.io, and your landing page will be familiar to you if you've used APM tools before. It will have errors, and latency, and request rate etc. But you can start playing around with it. If you're trying to diagnose the problem, or if you're -- one of my favorite things about Honeycomb... |
So you might go "Ah, I care about this", and we'll go "Oh, these errors could be maybe the export endpoint, all from this region of Amazon, all for this particular user ID, all for this particular language pack", and it's really clear, you just immediately see "Ah, this is what's different about the thing that I care a... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So let's say that we have certain requests which sometimes are really, really slow. Could Honeycomb help us identify why they're slow? |
**Charity Majors:** Hell yeah. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay, okay... I'll try that. And if it doesn't work, who should I talk to? |
**Charity Majors:** \[laughs\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** You? |
**Charity Majors:** There's a great little Intercom pop-up in the app that will take you to our support team, and they're wonderful. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Amazing. That's exactly what I intend to do next. |
**Charity Majors:** Excellent. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. And behind the scenes, where are all those events going? |
**Charity Majors:** Well, they've come to the Honeycomb API, which is pretty thin little shim that does some rate limiting etc. and then drops them into Kafka. And Kafka queue is consumed by a pair of retrievers; that's our custom -- you know, I've spent my entire career telling people "Never write a database!" and I'd... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay... What's the difference? |
**Charity Majors:** Not much. \[laughs\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Right, okay... |
**Charity Majors:** It's a \[unintelligible 00:27:04.12\] store so it gets consumed by a pair of retriever nodes, and pretty swiftly it also gets aged out to S3. Then when you're issuing requests via the Honeycomb UI, the queries are actually run by Lambda jobs, which will then fan out to a full table scan. So we merge... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's interesting. So I hear S3, I hear Lambda... The API - you're not using API Gateway or anything like that from Amazon? |
**Charity Majors:** API Gateway? |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Whatever the name of the service is; they have a service which basically provides API functionality for your Lambdas, so you can hook up Lambdas to APIs... |
**Charity Majors:** No. |
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