Infrastructure as Code is an emerging practice that encourages the writing of cloud infrastructure as code instead of clicking your way to deployment. I feel like “ClickOps” is where we all started years ago when there weren’t any other options. The lessons learned from the inconsistency in human deployment were the genesis for the automation and power that comes from building your cloud stacks as code. Now, many start from IaC as the patterns and practices are well-defined. But instead of re-hashing those commentaries, I want to give you my opinions on why IaC decisions are more than about the tech. Infrastructure as Code is a shift of responsibilities that brings your teams closer together and will help establish a culture of accountability but it will come at a cost.
Tag: observability
Tracing HTTP Requests with Go and Datadog
Small follow up on the last post regarding tracing. I’m a huge fan of Event Driven systems or EDA (Event Driven Architecture) but sometimes you do need to make that synchronous HTTP request in order to fetch more data. Perhaps you are building a “saga” or sometimes events just published what happened and to whom it happened but not specifics about the actual event. For that you need to return back out and fetch more info.
When that happens, you’ll need to use a HTTP Client for making that request. And when doing so, it often sort of turns into a black hole, especially if you have multiple calls to make and you need to distinguish them. Enter again the Datadog libraries. With a simple wrapping of the client, when you make requests WithContext you will get a nicer and prettier display of what the span is. In the case below, I usually like to set the VERB that was requested in addition to the URL. Feel free to use/show whatever makes sense to you
Observing Lambda with Datadog and Golang
Instrumenting code for observability upfront is one of the most important things that a developer can do for his/her “future” self. And instrumenting for observing AWS Lambda with Datadog and Golang is actually much simpler than you could imagine So what does that mean?