ALTERNATE UNIVERSE DEV

Observy McObservface

Untangling The Mesh - Observability The Hard Way with Kelsey Hightower

In this episode, Kelsey Hightower talks about the new mesh revolution in Kubernetes while teasing his upcoming book: Mesh The Hard Way. The idea is that we can write applications that talk to other applications and that there's a lot of stuff that happens in the middle of those two things. 

Kelsey talks about what observability means, and that as it stands, developers have a tendency to collect metrics, but most of the time, they’re not really sure why they’re collecting them. He says that there is a balance between collecting data and being able to create something actionable and that it's what you do with data is where power comes from. 

Challenges come and go, and you can get depressed about them and complain about them, or you can look at challenges as an opportunity to overcome things. You may ask yourself how you can keep up with all of the observability tools out there, but most of the tools we see today are no different than most of the tools that existed ten or fifteen years ago. They may have better UIs and workflows, but fundamentally they are all roughly the same. 

Kelsey urges developers to take comfort in that, be patient, learn what you can, and go as deep as you can. More than likely what you're learning now will be applicable in the future. Understand that you have control over the pace of information you let in, and the pace of things you choose to adopt, and you can also take a break and it will all be okay.

Should you find a burning need to share your thoughts or rants about the show please spray them at devrel@newrelic.com. While you’re going to all the trouble of shipping us some bytes, please consider taking a moment to let us know what you’d like to hear on the show in the future. Despite the all-caps flaming you will receive in response, please know that we are sincerely interested in your feedback; we aim to appease. Follow us on the Twitters: @ObservyMcObserv.

Episode source