Empowerment through Observability

Learning to building observable systems will empower us to move past the rat race which is “test everything before release”.

For the last year, Abby has been embedding herself in the world of operations to uncover how the tools and techniques used by operations engineers can support testing. This talk will examine Abby’s experiences improving team and business outcomes through a focus on observability with topics like:

- Reimagining how we define useful alerts based on experiences writing test automation suites

- Building test environments to continuously deliver applications when dependent systems move at a much slower pace

- Asking “what is normal” for systems that have not previously defined baselines

Recent innovations in tooling for operations has been driven by by the last ten years of growing DevOps adoption. DevOps speeds up feedback loops, delivers value faster, and shortens time to validate before release while simultaneously tricking us into thinking we still can test everything in a CD pipeline.

The extensive cost associated with creating and maintaining “realistic” pre-production environments still leaves many issues which just can’t be imagined or recreated in even the best case scenario. The large scale and messy reality that is real customer use cases like global traffic or malformed historical data will always uncover new understanding about our systems. To identify and triage these behaviours we need to reimagine testing through the lens of observability. By understanding Abby’s lessons learned, you will be empowered to understand and apply observability to your own product.