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.

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.