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“DevOps” is very easy to say. However the easy phrase masks an uneasy pressure between improvement and operations that may result in poor communication and in the end poor administration of more and more advanced tech stacks. Addressing that DevOps pressure and communication hole additionally occurs to be problem that the founders of an observability startup known as Honeycomb intention to unravel.
Honeycomb’s story begins circa 2012, when two engineers, Christine Yen and Charity Majors, discovered themselves working collectively at Parse, which developed a back-end for cellular apps. Yen was a developer whereas Majors was extra inclined in direction of the infrastructure. A friendship blossomed between them, regardless of variations in jobs and pure abilities.
“She was an ops and infra engineer who I’m certain popped out of the womb carrying a pager. I used to be a product engineer who needed to construct cool experiences for our clients,” Yen stated. “I used to be fearful of manufacturing and, to be frank, broke a bunch of Charity’s infrastructure.”
Even again in 2012, gaps in observability had been apparent. Getting data out of logs was difficult, and it solely acquired tougher because the software program stack developed from monolithic functions operating on-prem in direction of microservices operating within the cloud–not to mention right this moment’s serverless and stateless apps operating in K8S clusters.
Parse was acquired by Fb in 2013, which uncovered Yen and Majors to a novel logging and metrics software known as Scuba. Constructed upon an in-memory time-series database, Scuba instantly allowed the engineers to visualise much more of the “nitty gritty” information, comparable to app IDs, SDK variations, and app variations, that had been beforehand off limits. That opened Yen and Majors’ eyes to a brand new world of observability element and efficiency troubleshooting.
“All the pieces was so quick you could possibly churn by means of tons and tons and tons of knowledge, spit out a chart, after which say ‘Drill into this one app and this one SDK model,’” Yen stated. “As a result of we had been a platform, we wouldn’t know if there was a Russian relationship app that may launch, that may use a brand new endpoint in an surprising manner and take down our Mongo cluster. However it occurred on a regular basis, and so we had to determine get forward of that.”
Emboldened by the Scuba expertise, Yen and Majors left Fb and based Honeycomb in 2016. The pair had an thought for a brand new sort of observability software that would categorical operations ideas in a builders’ language, and (hopefully) bridge the hole between Dev and Ops, thereby bringing again some semblance of simplicity–or at the very least understandability.
“What was once these fairly comprehensible worlds that could possibly be understood at a excessive degree the place all of us had Rails apps on 5 beefy EC2 cases, they usually had been your pets, proper? You give them names–cute issues–and also you get very confused when one goes down,” stated Yen, who’s Honeycomb’s CEO. “And now it’s the pets versus cattle. Now we have now cases we’re biking by means of within the cloud. We’re shifting from these 5 app servers and monoliths to microservices on Kubernetes pods which can be continually getting recycled.”
Honeycomb goals to make advanced observability information readily consumable by builders (Picture courtesy Honeycomb)
At a technical degree, Yen and Majors, Honeycomb’s CTO, made just a few selections in 2016 that set it on its path. It determined there was no good motive to separate up the Holy Trinity of observability information–logs, metrics, and traces–as some observability corporations do. By storing logs, metrics, and traces collectively, it might be simpler to correlate particulars present in them, which might speed up the remediation of issues.
The second large architectural resolution the corporate made was it chosen an column-oriented database by which to retailer all this observability information. This made Honeycomb extra like Snowflake than Datadog, Yen stated.
“We didn’t invent column shops, and we’ll be the primary to inform you that there’s nothing, actually, all that particular about column shops,” she advised BigDATAwire in an interview at re:Invent 2024 final week. “However we had been the primary individuals to essentially begin to query, ought to we possibly not have logs over right here and metrics over right here endlessly? Ought to we possibly attempt to discover methods [to keep them together], particularly in the event that they’re speaking about the identical factor that occurred in an software?”
As an alternative of spending effort and time attempting to affix these information sorts collectively to allow them to be analyzed, Honeycomb’s design naturally shops them collectively, utilizing the OpenTelemetry (OTEL) format. That not solely eliminates the necessity for information integration, nevertheless it helps with the following functionality that Honeycomb is understood for: Offering context to the advanced metadata it collects, which in flip helps flip the technical infrastructure jargon that operations of us communicate into the enterprise language that builders communicate.
“It meant that beforehand Charity can be like ‘Christine, what did you do to the write throughput on my Cassandra occasion?’ And I’d be like, let me attempt to determine it out. I’m actually scared,” Yen stated. “It turned these conversations into, ‘Hey, Christine, I noticed elevated write throughput on my Cassandra cases. So I appeared, and evidently that elevated site visitors is pushed by this app on this endpoint. What’s occurring?’
“And I’d be like, Oh, that’s a regression,” she continued. “Now let me go look, as a result of now it’s in my world. Now I can go attempt to reproduce it in a take a look at. Now I can go have a look at the enterprise logic. Now I perceive why it issues, as a result of I do know which apps you’re speaking about, and that’s the way in which that it modified how we work collectively as an engineering crew.”
That strategy appears to be resonating, because the San Francisco-based firm has already signed 800 paying clients, together with corporations like Vanguard, Fender Guitars, and Jack Henry & Associates. The corporate, which has raised about $147 million by means of a Sequence D spherical, additionally final week picked up a 2024 BigDATAwire Readers’ Alternative Award within the class of Greatest Large Information Product: DataOps and Observability.
Honeycomb isn’t the one observability firm that’s shaking up the established order today. Corporations which have moved their IT operations to public clouds are straining below mountains of logs, metrics, and traces, in addition to the large prices of storing and processing all that information, they usually’re open to new concepts. The incumbent observability distributors nonetheless have momentum, however a brand new guard is rising on this house, together with startups like Honeycomb.
Honeycomb is actively pursuing clients who’re uninterested in the enterprise practices of a few of its large observability software rivals and are on the lookout for one thing new to deal with the large storage and processing challenges of right this moment, Yen stated.
“You have to be questioning what you’re doing along with your instruments to start with, and possibly if what you’re doing along with your instruments is identical factor you’ve been doing for the final 20 years with telemetry, with APM, logging, and monitoring instruments, maybe the way in which we strategy constructing software program is value a revisit,” she stated. “I believe possibly that’s why your readers like us, as a result of we’re right here to query.”
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