The pervasiveness of cloud and containers has led to systems that are much more distributed and dynamic in nature. Highly elastic microservice and serverless architectures mean containers spin up on demand and scale to zero when that demand goes away. In this world, servers are very much cattle, not pets. This shift has exposed deficiencies in some of the tools and practices we used in the world of servers-as-pets. Specifically, there are questions around how we monitor and debug these types of systems at scale. And with the rise of DevOps and product mindset, making data-driven decisions is becoming increasingly important for agile development teams.
In this talk, we discuss a new approach to system monitoring and data collection: the *observability pipeline*. For organizations that are heavily siloed, this approach can help empower teams when it comes to operating their software. The observability pipeline provides a layer of abstraction that allows you to get operational data such as logs and metrics everywhere it needs to be without impacting developers and the core system. Unlocking this data can also be a huge win for the business with things like auditability, business analytics, and pricing. Lastly, it allows you to change backing data systems easily or test multiple in parallel. With the amount of data and the number of tools modern systems demand these days, we’ll see how the observability pipeline becomes just as essential to the operations of a service as the CI/CD pipeline.
