EP 281: Mobile, Monoliths & Microservices w/ LightStep

com Container Journal. You're listening to another DevOps chat. Got a great guest to talk with today.

I hope you're going to enjoy it. I'd like to introduce you to Daniel Spoonhower, better known as Spoons. Spoons, welcome to DevOps chat.

Hi. Great to be here. So this means you are CTO and co-founder of LightStep.

And though some in our audience are probably familiar with LightStep being, that is the first time we've had it's someone from might step on our part podcast. We're going to ask you to kind of do some of the heavy lifting here. Sure.

Tell our audience a little bit about white step, what you guys do. So LightStep provides simple observability for a deep systems. We think observability is more than just metrics, logs and traces.

It's really about being able to navigate from effect to cause. So whether you're pushing a new deployment, you're on call, you got paged or you're just trying to improve performance. That's our ability.

Tools like LightStep should be all to give you the insights that you need to understand what's happening in your services and across your system. Excellent. And just by way of good, you know, giving the audience the background.

You talk a little bit about your own personal journey. You are a co-founder and CTO. It was like before like LightStep.

Yeah. So, yeah, I'm co-founder and CTO at LightStep. But we have three all three of the co-founders are technical.

And so we all have done technical things and we all have done a lot of non-technical things too, which has been pretty fun for me just to learn about finance and about commercial real estate. Who knows what. I'm an engineer, an engineer by training.

Before this, I was at Google for a while. I worked both on their internal infrastructure team, which was super interesting, as well as on the cloud platform. And I have various other experience that big and small companies.

I was in grad school for a while doing academic stuff. So, yeah, a lot of things, actually. All right.

So before I know you guys have some new product announcements coming out, but, you know, right step is, as I mentioned, new to our audience here on podcasts. But it's been around five years. Right?

I think you gave every one of the. You know, the brief elevator pitch about it. com, right, Spode, we've seen a PM turn into a IOPS.

Companies go public in the space and everything. Several. And yet the need to kind of monitor, manage, see what's happening is is still here.

And I don't want to say it's getting easier. You know, because I think it's just, you know, natural things get more complex as we continue to build and so forth. And I guess that makes the monitoring easier.

But when does it get simpler? Well, yes, I think the situation has gotten a lot more complex than might because of things like micro services or serverless or things like that. I actually think a lot of complexity comes from the fact that we no longer run our whole applications like we use Dynamo DBE.

We use third party fraud detection service. Right. There's a lot of pieces of our of our software that are not even ours anymore.

So that adds to the complexity. I think that simplicity has to come from focusing more on the the use cases like what are you as a developer actually trying to get done? And then, I mean, I think this is where people kind of get into things like apps is like using software to sort of harness the data that we have to help you in that task.

I think that can be a real, really nice as a developer, right. To not have to understand all of the deaths of what's going on underneath hood. Sure.

I mean, I just find it somewhat ironic that, you know, we're going to we're going to break down silos. We're going to break up this monolith and go to micro services so that we can deal with smaller, more easily digestible threads. And then, you know, and we're going to orchestrate all of this with a great tool like Supernet Nettie's.

And then I look at it, and I'm not the developer you are. I'm not claiming to be or the technical person, but I'm gets it. It's just the nature of the universe at some level anyway.

You guys are well aware of this institute. This is where this is the world you play in. You've got some new product announcements.

Yes. That's right. Yes.

So, I mean, the history of let's step a little bit is that we started as a tracing tool. Collecting data. Sort of.

Exactly. To do to address the situation you're talking about. You've broken your application into some pieces and you want to be able to understand the big picture.

Right. And put them back together. And what we've done actually is to continue to integrate additional data sources into that so that we can provide sort of more user centric things.

So what we're rolling out right now is a couple of different pieces. One is error analysis. So being able to understand you have a spike in errors in your service.

Harnessing that data, whether it's Trace's or logs or metrics, to understand what the cause of those errors are. We have a detailed roll out analysis. So even if you're in the middle of a rollout, so you're saying a canary or bluegreen or something like that, you understand what's happening.

We'll do that analysis for you and do a side by side to tell you what's different about the new release. And one thing that's pretty exciting is that, you know, part of this is integrating metrics into the platform. Metrics are like a tool that everyone has been using forever and ever and ever.

But, you know, there's a lot of metrics out there. And part of what we think is important is that we're able to focus on the right metrics, the metrics that are actually able to explain what's happening right now. Absolutely.

So. This new release, April 2nd, is the key day, yeah, so people listening to this can go check it out right now. Like that dark.

That's right. We've got free developers here that you can try. We also have a really cool sandbox.

That sort of it's a sort of interactive playground where you can check out features and you can basically walk through one of these scenarios. So say you're doing a really say you're trying to not to bug an arrow or something like that. It's not you know, it's not totally constrained, but will kind of show you along and give you a bit of a guide that you can still explore the rest of the product layer there, but really trying to help people kind of put two and two together and understand this.

No, I Scarlett. I love that man. I got to tell you, we've been experimenting with something like that.

For a project we're doing on an DevOps stock somewhere, you know, we want to have let people do a little bit more Hands-On playing with different vendors tools. And so we're trying to give them a sandbox right where they can go in and do these things with. You know, we we were talking off or Mike Righton originally, this was going to be an announcement around Kube Khan, which unfortunately, you know, got pushed and, you know, not getting into the whole politics and the the the whole thing around Corona virus and all this stuff.

But certainly we need we need we need more ways. We need more diverse ways of of allowing people to see what kind of new products, what technologies, how can they get it under their nails a little bit and really. Yeah.

And see if it's for them. Yeah, absolutely. I mean I think people learn in lots of different ways.

Right. Some people want to read. Some people want to watch a video.

I personally really like doing stuff like I until I've, you know, made it, coded it or whatever, I, I never remember it, so. Absolutely. I mean, you're not alone.

I do think specifically poor technology renders having those kind of hands on that people can actually go in. We see it even on our web and we do a webinar with the vendors doing a real like demo that people could follow along. We get insane numbers of people signing on to that versus someone just talking, you know, and that doesn't work.

So, look, let's talk a little bit about what was driving this for you guys. Yeah. I think, you know, we should say when I say we, I mean, one of the other co-founders, Ben and I, spent a while at Google and Google.

It's a weird place and a lot of ways. But there is are some advantages, like there were ways in which being Google is a little bit like seeing the future. And they were called micro services at the time.

But there were a lot of teams that built software that all had to stack together. And we saw, you know, sort of firsthand the problems that they had in terms of like, OK, I've broken this thing into pieces and now how do I understand the bigger picture? We saw a lot of arguments among those teams like, you know, don't it's your fault.

No, no, that's your fault. And like, needing some data to actually kind of resolve it. It's I think for us, you know, we saw the rest of the industry starting to adopt these things through different technology, maybe.

But the same idea that you can have teams work independently and deploy independently, yet still build a single application. And so the motivation was really try to help those those folks to understand what's happening. And, you know, we see, like not being used by individuals, but actually, you know, more and more by teams, we see it use an operational review.

So, you know, you're doing a postmortem. You want to show people what happened. Let's say it's a great tool to help facilitate that conversation.

And for us, this is really about being able to help those folks deliver software more competently and then, you know, get back to building new features and doing all the fun stuff that they've done. Now, I made. Wouldn't it be great if we just all we did was the fun stuff all the time?

Some of us are lucky enough to do that. I mean, me included. But get these things.

These are important things that need to get done and. And lifestyle like Stephan's is, is following that up. I wanted to return to the cute current thing, if we can for seconds, like coupon itself or rather the cute community.

Right. And look who Bernardes itself comes out of Google. Right.

Those people I'm not going to say Google, the Google people invented micro services, but certainly a lot of very foundational work was done there. When you are out and about or you see how this community has grown and the enthusiasm for things like lights that bright. I mean, how does that you know, I'm going to give you a warm, a warm fuzzy inside and say, hey, man, there's a there's a whole humungous community of people who share our visions or our outlooks, and it's a lot easier to sell to that yourself, but it's a lot easier to sell those solutions than it be.

I mean, they're certainly pushing rope uphill. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think.

Yeah. I mean, communities as a result of a lot of mistakes that were made the first time. So I think a lot of a lot of people would admit that.

No, but I think the community is really great. I think the thing that's pretty exciting to me about it is really thinking about things like infrastructure as code about, thinking about, automation about. And, you know, that these things, which we kind of think of historically as, you know, maybe more of a craft actually can be an engineering discipline.

And I think that's a lot of that community. It's actually really great. Whenever I tend to have gone to see the range of folks there from, you know, sort of platform folks all the way up to people that are just, you know, building your features and then shipping code, that they're also excited about those tools.

That's that's that's really like for me makes a big difference just to see that it's not a niche thing so much. Right. That it's really a broad community.

That's that's exciting. Oh, yeah. No, it's it's for me personally, I have 20 years in the security infrastructure space.

I get excited when actually all the security people are excited because I really feel like. Maybe this time we'll do better than we got out on this and we're, you know, security is really kind. It's not the caboose on the engine for say it.

It's like people care. And not just the security. People care, community care.

That's important. So, you know, in today's world, right. This is in this year's release.

This is just the second sort of, you know, new feature set. What? And one builds on the next.

Right. So what's next here? Yes, I think we're continuing to think about how we can do automated analysis.

So we have a feature in the productivity called correlations, which essentially, you know, you pick out some some effect you think is important. You know, errors went up, speed went down, whatever it is. And stuff will find the things that correlate with that within the set of requests that you're looking at.

So we have a bunch more features related to that coming out later this year. So this is kind of how I when people say apps, how it's like got a roll my eyes a little bit. But this is kind of how we think about, you know, bringing artificial intelligence to DevOps.

Right. Is that it's really through sort of putting the right clues in front of you. Right.

It's not about providing 10000 clues to solve industry. It's about five. Right.

So a bunch of stuff on that. And then, I mean, the other place that we're thinking about is how how do we get more proactive. Right.

How do we get in front of you and help you anticipate when these things are going to be happening? Well, I'm so so spoon's. What do you mean?

You grow and you'll be on this side when so I'm no longer building products or founding companies that are building products. And I hear people come up with all these. I don't want to say it's just a marketing term.

You can definitely say that. I would be the first time I heard. I asked you.

I said, what? What do you do? Well, you know, I've been in technology long enough with look, just don't call me late for dinner, right?

I don't really care anymore what you call it. And also on the media side of it is on your side of it. I just report the news.

You are theoretically right. We know you want to call it. You know, if it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, it's a duck.

But in any of that, I do hear you about that. You know, you weren't talking about an overhyped term. Yeah, I think in the world of in in DevOps, I think it's actually it's actually there's some jaw dropping.

So, yeah, I think because, you know, if you're talking about, like, I don't know, ad placement or something like that. No. Really cares about why.

Right. Like you put the ad and someone clicks. Nice job.

Right. Like cadaver lots. But like you got page and some things like that service over there.

You should definitely roll it back. Yeah, but why? Like, I'm not just gonna start rolling back things as robots tell me.

I said so that's why I hear you that it's out there. Well, listen, I told you, the time goes really quick here and I think we're about out there. But Smooth's was great having ya here.

Good luck with this new release. I would say you look forward to seeing you next, Kukerin. Let's let's hope there is a.

It's very nice to see you somewhere, and if not, why not? Otherwise, we'll be. We'll have you back here on the podcast, men.

All right. Hey, that was Daniel Spoonhower, Spoons, CTO co-founder at LightStep. He's was just our guest on DevOps chat.

com, Security Boulevard. You've just listened to another DevOps chat. Have a great day.