Continuous Delivery

Yes, I Test In Production (And So Do You)

What's the motivation for this talk?

The motivation for this talk is to help people understand that deploying software carries an irreducible element of uncertainty and risk.  Trying too hard to prevent failures will actually make your systems and your teams *more* vulnerable to failure and prolonged downtime. So what can you do about it?

Martin Fowler famously had a blog post about how “you must be this tall for microservices” or organizational maturity before you’re really ready for microservices.  Is there a “you must be this tall” equivalent for being able to test in production?

Absolutely.  Starting with observability. Until you can drill down and explain any anomalous raw event, you should not attempt any advanced maneuvers - you’ll just be irresponsibly screwing with production and starting fires right and left that you don’t even know about. And I mean observability in the technical sense -- traditional monitoring is not good enough.  You need instrumentation, an event-oriented perspective, ideally some tracing, etc. You need the tooling that lets you hunt down outliers and aggregate at read time by high-cardinality dimensions like request ID. No aggregation at write time. Etc.