By Our Powers Combined: Observability for Developers

A presentation at CodeMash 2020 in in Sandusky, OH 44870, USA by Fen Aldrich

The world of maintaining applications is shifting. Our Systems Administrators aren’t monitoring our application servers, it’s the SREs determining SLIs and SLOs for our Micro-Services and making sure our Cloud-Distributed systems are Observable in near-real time. It’s enough for buzzword burnout. Furthermore, the DevOps movement asking developers to work closer with our operations teams and handle on-call shifts! Does that mean you have to learn everything about DevOps and SRE just to keep doing what you truly love, building things out of code?

Not entirely, but just as SysOps folk have started to learn valuable lessons about codifying their work, so too can developers learn how to own software in production from those that have been doing it every day.

Without diving through the whole world of Software Reliability Engineering and systems monitoring, this talk will level set and give a crash course on Observability. Let’s cross-class some Ops with our Dev and build reliable, maintainable software together!

Attendees will walk away with an understanding of:

  • A level-set understanding of Observability so they can collaborate with their colleagues meaningfully.
  • How cross-collaboration and a shared language provide for better quality software development
  • A handful of ideas to keep in mind during development, to make operating software easier
  • Why Developers should be On-Call, too, and the value that provides for both the Ops teams AND for building better software.

Resources

The following resources were mentioned during the presentation or are useful additional information.