Microservices Observability: Lessons from Debugging 1970s Radios
When you open up a 1970s radio, you aren’t met with logs or stack traces. You’re met with voltages, currents, and signals. If the audio is distorted, you don’t “grep” for an error; you trace the signal path from the antenna to the speaker. Modern microservices aren’t that different, though we often forget it. We’ve traded copper wires for HTTP requests and vacuum tubes for Docker containers, but the fundamental challenge of observability remains the same: how do you understand what’s happening inside a complex, distributed system without tearing it apart? ...