In modern software development and operations, everything can be monitored. This isn’t a matter of technology. If you want to monitor something, you can. However, modern monitoring tools come with a price, and while sometimes that price isn’t too high, at other times the cost can be unbearable. For example, an APM tool that monitors your server’s health with CPU and memory metrics is pretty cheap and non-intrusive.
Troubleshooting customer issues in production is a difficult job. These are the issues that impact the business the most, so consequently, stress levels are almost always at a high. And it’s never fun to be measured against an SLA, which feels like you’re stuck in a losing battle. And it’s especially hard in the world of microservices and Kubernetes, because it’s so difficult to recreate a reliable replica of production in your local development environment.
Over the last year, we have witnessed a shift in engineering working habits. COVID-19 forced many of us into lockdown. Instead of working from the office, coffee shops, and airport lounges, I found myself mostly working out of my (hastily built) home office. For many of us, this meant shifting back to a workstation over a trusty laptop. Not surprisingly, this did nothing to abate the heated discussion over which computers and operating systems are best for developing software.
Since the beginning of time, back to before humans invented fire, there were two traditional ways to debug applications: one way -after having invented hieroglyphics, of course - was by reading log lines and the other was by using the common debuggers that surrounded a cave dev’s cave. It’s safe to say that society has progressed since then and, luckily, so too has traditional debugging.
You wouldn’t expect an architect to build a skyscraper with just a hammer and a ladder, right? Then why do we sometimes look at developer tools as something ‘extra’, or as a ‘nice to have’, and simply assume that all that a developer needs is a laptop and an internet connection? A skyscraper is built in a fraction of the time and to a much higher quality if the team has access to top of the line equipment.
