Recently, a friend reminded me of a joke we used to have when we were both developers at a huge software corporation (we won’t mention names, but back when printers were a thing, you probably owned one of theirs). We didn’t develop printers. We developed performance testing and monitoring tools. We were the dev team, which was completely separate from the QA team and from the Ops team (yes, I’m that old – we didn’t even call it DevOps back then).

Last year tested us on many fronts and resilience was a major theme. How well we handle change, unrest and uncertainty have all translated into how well we can deal with major events — such as a global pandemic. Being able to quickly adapt our habits has helped us make the most of the unique year that we had.

The first lesson you learn as you start to work around the DevOps field is that being optimistic is not a good virtue. While that might seem overly pessimistic, let me explain. We plan our architecture to fit our needs, deal with edge cases, scale our applications up and as wide as we see fit, and with all of that, we still always expect for the unexpected to happen. As engineers, we are expected to deal with that unexpected.

As an R&D manager, there are many things on my mind that keep me up at night. These thoughts range anywhere from impossible research explorations, employee motivation, rising cloud costs, all the way to security incidents. However, there is one that sweeps all of them aside when they surface and that is solving customer facing issues.

As we see more customers adopting Rookout for debugging cloud-native applications, we are not surprised to learn that a significant number of them work in a microservice environment. In the most common case among these customers, each service has its own code repository maintained by the team who develops the service.