Software changes so rapidly that developing on the cutting edge of it cannot fall to a single person. When it comes to asynchronously disseminating information about projects, code comments, PR conversations, Slack, RFCs, and other investigatory documents do a wonderful job, but no amount of async communication replaces the magic of two brains bouncing ideas off of each other.

We recently took a daring step to test and improve the reliability of the Honeycomb service: we abruptly destroyed one third of the infrastructure in our production environment using AWS’s Fault Injection Service. You might be wondering why the heck we did something so drastic. In this post, we’ll go over why we did it and how we made sure that it wouldn’t impact our service.

Transitioning from a monolithic system to a cloud-native microservices environment, Ritchie Bros. sought to modernize their observability infrastructure to support the transition and fuel future growth.

Getting the right people working in the CoPE is crucial to success because these change agents must limber up the organization and promote the flexibility necessary to perform resilience.

Two years ago, we shared our experiences with adopting AWS Graviton3 and our enthusiasm for the future of AWS Graviton and Arm. Once again, we're privileged to share our experiences as a launch customer of the Amazon EC2 R8g instances powered by AWS Graviton4, the newest generation of AWS Graviton processors.

The Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science at the University of Oxford is pioneering the better use of data, evidence, and digital tools in healthcare, policy, and beyond. The institute employs an open-source approach with its OpenSAFELY analytics platform, enabling high-impact research that yields actionable insights, drives innovation, and enhances lives globally.

Generative AI is having a bit of a moment—well, maybe more than just a bit. It’s an exciting time to be alive for a lot of people. But what if you see stories detailing a six month old AI firm with no revenue seeking a $2 billion valuation and feel something other than excitement in the pit of your stomach?

With a diverse range of applications, HappyCo sought to advance their system investigations with a modern observability solution while embarking on an application refactor project.

In the not-too-distant past, building software was relatively straightforward. The simplicity of LAMP stacks, Rails, and other well-defined web frameworks provided a stable foundation. Issues were isolated, systems failed in predictable ways, and engineers had time to innovate on new features for the business. And it was good.

Having telemetry is all well and good—amazing, in fact. It’s easy to do: add some OpenTelemetry auto-instrumentation libraries to your stack and they’ll fill your disks with data pretty quickly. However, having good telemetry data—data that’s curated into being useful—is something that is both cost-effective and represents good value.

Everyone's talking about “observability,” but many don’t know what it is, what it’s for, or what benefits it offers. With this framing of observability in terms of goals instead of tools, we hope teams will have better language for improving what their organization delivers and how they deliver it.

Earlier this year, we upgraded from Confluent Platform 7.0.10 to 7.6.0. While the upgrade went smoothly, there was one thing that was different from previous upgrades: due to changes in the metadata format for Confluent’s Tiered Storage feature, all of our tiered storage metadata files had to be converted to a newer format.