text stringlengths 0 1.8k |
|---|
There was an engineer at Monzo who used to do this repeatedly, where he would dive into some of the gnarliest bugs, that would scare most people away... And it was just a fascinating read, being able to go "I have this channel. I can look at that, I can look at a timeline", and you can sort of scan through and catch up... |
And that's the approach we use at Incident.io. As Stephen says, we are just using it for any kind of structured, but interrupt-driven approach to dealing with things. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** How many incidents have you had in your instance of Incident.io, do you know? Or do you wanna check? |
**Chris Evans:** I can tell you... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I can tell you that the Changelog.com Incident.io is at number four. So the next one would be the fifth one... In a few months. That's been really, really good. And the thing which I would like to add is that the mentality shift which happened when it comes to viewing incidents is something positive, ... |
**Chris Evans:** \[28:18\] Nice. Well, to answer your question from earlier, 91 incidents is what we have declared. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's a good one. |
**Chris Evans:** Yeah. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** How many sev1's? |
**Chris Evans:** We had eight major severity incidents for us. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Over how many months? |
**Chris Evans:** A year and a bit. No, maybe a year, something like that. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** A year, okay. So one sev1 every month and a half. Okay, that's interesting. So did this have to do with your production setup, with anything like that? Or what is a sev1 incident, I suppose is what I'm asking. |
**Chris Evans:** It's a good question. So we have sort of like guideline text within the product which sort of helps to sort of steer you to set the right value... \[unintelligible 00:28:55.21\] We've actually had none that we've marked as like critical, the top-top severity. These are major, which is what we'd conside... |
And to give you sense of what some of these are like - a Slack is having an outage, which is four of these are "Slack is returning 500s", or whatever, and we're at the mercy of them, building on top of their platform... But we'd still consider it an incident, because we own that relationship with our customers, and it'... |
**Stephen Whitworth:** I want to come back and touch on what you were saying earlier, Gerhard, which was around how your behavior with respect to incidents has changed from using our tool... That's the goal. We are selling technology at one level, but with our most successful customers what we're actually achieving is ... |
**Break:** \[31:38\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I'm wondering, how does the Incident.io production setup look like? You know what ours looks like, we're very public about it... But what does your production setup look like? |
**Stephen Whitworth:** It's intentionally very simple. We run a Go app, which is just a single binary, on Heroku; so that runs all of our own infrastructure. We use Postgres as a backing store, GitHub stores all of our code, we run tests and deploy using Circle CI... I'm trying think -- and a little bit of BigQuery and... |
**Chris Evans:** Yeah. I think it's \[unintelligible 00:34:50.29\] I've come from a world where I was responsible for everything, from the lowest level moving parts in your storage system, through to deployment tooling, and all these kinds of things, and it's genuinely a wonderful experience being in a "serverless" env... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That sounds amazing. That sounds like the dreamplace to be in when it comes to iterating, when it comes to shipping features out there, seeing how they work... So you mentioned a single Go binary - is that right? So no microservices, a monolithic Go binary... Is that what it is? |
**Stephen Whitworth:** \[35:57\] Yeah. So it's broken down by services internally. So a service would be responsible for maintaining actions, or listing and updating custom fields against an incident. So we sort of factored everything out internally, but the fact that everything is just in one binary makes testing, dep... |
**Chris Evans:** Worth highlighting as well that there are multiple replicas of that single \[unintelligible 00:36:32.27\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Of course, of course. Yeah, that was an important one. What about the assets? Do you bake them in in a single Go binary as well? Is that how you deploy assets? |
**Stephen Whitworth:** This is \[unintelligible 00:36:45.11\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah, for like the website. Like, Incident.io, when it loads up, all the assets are CSS, JavaScript, the images... Where do they live? |
**Stephen Whitworth:** They're served through the Go binary as well. So we have Netlify for our website, and that handles everything there. But everything from the actual application itself, including the frontend and backend, is served all from the same Go binary. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. So the website part is deployed separately. That's like your Netlify deployment. But the API, which is the thing that Slack interacts with - that is your Go binary. |
**Stephen Whitworth:** Absolutely. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. That was a really interesting thing. I couldn't figure out, "How do I get the images, the screenshots that I do for incidents, on the incident page?" And I figured out that if you \[unintelligible 00:37:27.22\] things in Slack, you're actually serving them from Slack, is that right? |
**Stephen Whitworth:** Not quite. There's some hidden complexity inside of Slack around images and being able to serve those. So there are two types of ways that images will show up within Slack. One of those is like an unfurl; so if you have a public image URL, for example, you post in Slack, that will unfurl in Slack... |
There is a second type of image that will display, which is an upload that you've done. So if I have an image of my laptop and I decide to upload that into my Slack workspace, that goes into Slack. Slack stores it on their servers, rather than unfurling from somewhere external... And it presents it out to you. And the ... |
So what we do actually is we anonymize images, we upload them to Google Cloud Storage, and then when you come to render your timeline, what we will do is we will enrich that \[unintelligible 00:38:27.20\] timeline item with a signed, short-lived URL for that image, to serve it out, basically. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's interesting. |
**Stephen Whitworth:** So a little bit of complexity to get that seemingly simple feature working. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Because I was wondering, where do you store those images? You have to put them somewhere, if you can't get them from Slack... Which kind of makes sense. You have to store them somewhere, and Google storage seems to be the place where you do that from. Interesting. I like that. |
So the simplicity - I can see how this keeps coming back. It seems to be a theme, keeping things simple, so that you can iterate faster. I think there's something there... That is obviously an understatement - I'm being a bit ironic, because yes, that's exactly how it works. If you keep things simple, on-purpose, thing... |
Do you use any feature flags when you have new features? How do you ship new features before they're finished? |
**Stephen Whitworth:** We do use feature flags. We don't have a particularly sophisticated setup there yet. So we're not using an Optimizely or LaunchDarkly or whatever the products are that do that. But we do have mechanisms internally to be able to say "This is just for us", so we will quite often test things ourselv... |
\[39:43\] I expect, as we grow, we will start growing the maturity around that, so that we can start building things for specific customers, and toggling it just for them, to help us build it in the open and get their feedback as we go. We've had a few companies actually that have been essentially design partners on fe... |
We're also very open about what we're working on... We have a public product roadmap which people can visit on Notion. We have a Slack community full of wonderful people that we also tell what we're going to build next... And coming back to the infrastructure side of things, this is all very intentional, because as an ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Now that you've mentioned this, Stephen, it reminded me of a feature that I was looking for and I couldn't find, that's runbooks. And I was wondering, where do you sit with runbooks? Do you see them part of Incident.io? How do you think about them? |
**Stephen Whitworth:** Yeah, it's a great question. Fundamentally, we're trying to build the sort of rails that you will run your incident process on. So the automation. And runbooks are a great way of saying, "Hey, this is a particular type of incident, and in this case you want to go do A, B and C." What we've found ... |
The first thing that we're going to build in order to make that more powerful is workflows. Workflows is a way to -- think of it a bit like Zapier or IFTTT for incidents. So if you can say -- in a particular case, let's say in a platform incident, I want to go and page the on-call engineer, I want to send an email to t... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[43:41\] No, that was very good. That was very good. I'm thinking in my head how does this link to my experience and what specifically I'm missing in Incident.io from the Changelog incidents which I ran. One of them - and actually, even more - I've caught myself wanting to write down, like "This is o... |
**Stephen Whitworth:** \[unintelligible 00:44:35.20\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** For following processes, like a series of steps, right? So we do like make, how to, rotate, secrets. And then it gives you a series of steps, you press Yes to the next one, next one, next one, and then eventually, you have rotate the secret. For example, how to upgrade Elixir. You run the make target,... |
**Stephen Whitworth:** I think that's very legitimate. What we're trying to build at Incident.io is essentially a structure store of information that takes data from Slack, from Zoom, from escalations through PagerDuty, from errors in Sentry, sort of pulls it down into a set of rows and columns, whereas previously it w... |
So yeah, I think there's a lot of stuff here. We've barely just scratched the surface of what will be useful once we've got all this stuff in Postgres, essentially. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** This is really attractive to me from the perspective of - building something simple requires you to understand the problem really well. That takes time. Building something complex - it's fairly easy. "Sling some stuff. Does it work? Well, it works for some; it's okay. Let's just move on. More features... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.