Lesson 186 - Fallacy #11: Observability is Optional

Most people are familiar with the famous “8 Fallacies of Distributed Computing”, which I talked about in Lesson 18. A fallacy is something we believe to be true, but is in fact not true. Neal Ford and I have been working hard to identify the next 8 fallacies. In Lesson 147 I published Fallacy #9 (versioning is easy), and in Lesson 148 I published Fallacy #10 (compensating updates always work). In this lesson I’ll introduce Fallacy #11 of distributed computing: observability is optional. In this lesson I’ll demonstrate what observability is in distributed architecture and why it is mandatory for most distributed architectures.
Head First Software Architecture: amzn.to/3VNFI0o
Software Architecture Monday: bit.ly/3dadEe3
Fundamentals of Software Architecture: amzn.to/3rgFLjY
Software Architecture: The Hard Parts: amzn.to/3BjMMF2

[@vpanichkin]

My manager suggested an analogy one day that I really like: Imagine you are a pilot. It’s very hard to fly safely if you don’t know what’s your altitude, how much gasoline do you have and, finally, how many passengers are behind you?

[@markrichards5014]

I love it!!! What a great analogy!

[@MohamedKamal-wd8hx]

:) funny as i'm learning opentelemetry, i get notified about this lesson :)

[@markrichards5014]

That's great! Hope it was useful...

[@MohamedKamal-wd8hx]

@@markrichards5014 after watching your iterative architecture training, architectural characteristics will be like objective functions we optimize by taking small iterations in the direction of gradients, observability and metrics are our approximation tools to gradients :) the optimization process is iterative architecture.

[@salih.karahan]

Without monitoring (observability), maintaining an application isn't realistic or easy. I strongly agree with that.

[@markrichards5014]

Me too 🙂

[@dimitrikalinin3301]

I saw companies where backups were a nice-to-have feature. Metrix and alerts? We don't have time for that! :)

[@markrichards5014]

#sigh.. I see this attitude as well, which is why Neal Ford and I coined this fallacy.

[@mahdi5796]

Excellent job. I've added the Wikipedia page to incorporate new fallacies brought up by you: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_distributed_computing

[@markrichards5014]

Thank you!!! I noticed it this morning and was wondering who did that. I really appreciate it!