There’s no doubt about it: data is the new gold. The last decade has created a revolution in everything related to data, whether it’s the creation of huge amounts of data or anything related to consumption, collection, processing, analysis, and decision making. In my previous experience as a data scientist, I can say that algorithms; whether a simple algorithm or an extremely complex neural networks model; as good as they may be, cannot beat bad data.

Let’s face it, debugging is broken. Whether you wholeheartedly agree or vehemently disagree with that statement, I think we can all agree that debugging, at the very least, has room for improvement. In fact, the way software developers debug their code hasn’t changed much.

If this past year has shown us anything, it’s the importance of resilience. Businesses of all sorts have had to find creative ways to get through a very tough time. And one of those ways is through technology. Companies that never planned to be technology-driven are now having meetings on Zoom, managing a remote workforce, and adopting new software.

As the world of technology continues to progress, so are the technologies that developers work with on the daily. Whether it’s cloud native, Kubernetes, serverless, or distributed architectures, every developer team has encountered the difficulties of working with them. Even more so, they’ve felt the challenges associated with trying to find the solutions to those same difficulties. But what if it was as easy as opening a book?

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.

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.