Speaker: Michael Hausenblas

Twenty years ago Kent Beck coined the term “test-driven development”: write tests first, develop the code later. Today, even if not practising true TDD, the idea of writing code without tests is an immediate warning sign to any developer. Yet, most teams still continue shipping code without adequate instrumentation to observe real system behaviour in production. Is it time we move to observability-driven development: “instrument first, develop later”?

With Continuous Profiling (CP) you capture resource usage (such as CPU, memory, I/O, etc.) over time, enabling you to pinpoint the (source) code that is slow or causes an issue. In recent times, CP has become mainstream and a number of open source projects such as Parca, Pyroscope, or CNCF Pixie are now available to benefit from CP in your own environment. We will have a look at the origins and the underlying motivation of CP and discuss cost and benefits of using CP in production. Finally, we will make the case that profiles are, in addition to logs, metrics, and traces, the missing pillar of observability.