Charity Majors: Deploys Are Just The Beginning

EP-005 | May 13, 2019 | 34:08 | Last updated: March 27, 2024

DevOps Engineering Culture

Charity Majors

Co-founder & CTO, Honeycomb

Co-founder of Honeycomb.io and a leading voice in observability and production engineering. Author and speaker on modern operations practices.

Charity Majors: Deploys Are Just The Beginning

Robby speaks with Charity Majors, CTO of Honeycomb about her work as an Infrastructure Engineer, how Honeycomb was created, all about working and testing in production, and why software engineers should be "on call" for their code.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What does Charity Majors say about observability vs monitoring?

Charity explains that observability is about asking new questions of your system in production, while monitoring checks known conditions. She recommends investing in observability tools that let you explore unknown-unknowns.

How does Charity Majors view deployments?

Charity argues that deploys should be boring, frequent, and small. The goal is to make deployments so routine that they become a non-event, reducing risk and increasing confidence.

What does Charity Majors recommend for production debugging?

Charity advocates for observability-driven development where engineers instrument their code and understand it in production. She believes the best debugging happens with real production data, not by trying to reproduce issues locally.