Debugging in production is always a necessary evil. No matter how well your code is written and reviewed, bugs are bound to appear, and their consequences are there for your users to see. While debugging any app has challenges, debugging legacy systems is a different ballgame. From unfamiliarity with the codebase to a lack of knowledge about the tech, your developers can find themselves aimlessly searching for solutions where solutions don’t exist.

This week Lightrun attended the annual FinOps X event. The event was sold out and packed with great speakers, practitioners, and amazing atmosphere. Compared to last year which had over 300 attendees, this year the event brought over 1200! Above is a screenshot taken from the venue entrance reminding the audience with the core principles of FinOps.

During the second quarter of this year, Lightrun persisted producing a wealth of developer productivity solutions and enhancements, aiming for greater troubleshooting of distributed workload applications, reduction of MTTR for complex issues, and cost optimization within cloud-computing. Read more below the main new features as well as the key product enhancements that were released in Q2 of 2023!

Code instrumentation is an essential practice in modern software development. Not only does it aid in debugging, it ultimately impacts the MTTR (Mean Time to Resolve) for software running in production. With changing software architectures and deployment patterns over the years, approaches to code instrumentation have also undergone a significant shift.

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are a crucial building block in modern software development, allowing applications to communicate with each other and share data consistently. APIs are used to exchange data inside and between organizations, and the widespread adoption of microservices and asynchronous patterns boosted API adoption inside the application itself.

Progressive delivery is a modification of continuous delivery that allows developers to release new features to users in a gradual, controlled fashion. It does this in two ways. Firstly, by using feature flags to turn specific features ‘on’ or ‘off’ in production, based on certain conditions, such as specific subsets of users. This lets developers deploy rapidly to production and perform testing there before turning a feature on.

At one particular time, a developer would spend a few months building a new feature. Then they’d go through the tedious soul-crushing effort of “integration.” That is, merging their changes into an upstream code repository, which had inevitably changed since they started their work. This task of Integration would often introduce bugs and, in some cases, might even be impossible or irrelevant, leading to months of lost work.