Practical, team-focused operability techniques for distributed systems - CLL18 - Matthew Skelton

In this session, Matthew shared his experience of helping teams to improve the operability of their software systems, covering some practical operability approaches and how teams can expand their understanding and awareness of operability through these simple, team-friendly techniques.

 

Sustainable software delivery through operability - Matthew Skelton, Conflux

Operability is a foundational aspect of sustainable digital delivery. What is operability and why does it matter?

 

Practical ways to increase operability within Continuous Delivery - CLL19 - Matthew Skelton

In this talk, Matthew shared his experience and techniques for improving operability, including:

  • How and why to test logging in a deployment pipeline

  • The UX of the Production Support team

  • The discussion template at OperabilityQuestions.com

  • Run Book dialogue sheets

  • Tracking time and effort on operational features

 

Un-broken logging - the foundation of operability - OIO15 - Matthew Skelton

The way in which many (most?) software teams use logging needs a re-think as we move into a world of microservices and remote sensors. Instead of using logging merely to dump out stack traces, our logs become a continuous trace of application state, with unique-enough identifiers for every interesting point of execution. We also use transaction identifiers to trace calls across components, services, and queues, so that we can reconstruct distributed calls after the fact. Logging becomes a rich source of insight for developers and operations people alike, as we 'listen to the logs' and tighten feedback cycles to improve our software systems.