Observability Engineering, 2nd Edition

Chapter 18. Observability for CI/CD Pipelines

This chapter was cowritten by Hugo Santos, CEO at Namespace Labs, and Liz Fong-Jones, Technical Fellow at Honeycomb.

Previously in this book, we’ve described the value of observability in accelerating feedback loops by enabling teams to understand what changes they need to make to software. But a barrier that often holds teams back from completing that feedback loop is how long it takes to actually get feedback on code that’s under development or to push code into production. If it feels like you’re operating the Mars rover manually with a minutes-long delay between putting in a command and seeing results, it doesn’t matter how quickly you can analyze and get results. Observability and controllability are duals, and you will need to make sure both feedback loops are in balance.

To specifically define the terms that we will be using throughout this chapter, we define CI to be the process of creating a build artifact from your source code and inputs, and CD to be the process of rolling that build artifact out to production. Both are required elements for closing the feedback loop between writing code and running it in production, but organizations may have differing degrees of complexity in each.

In this chapter, you’ll learn to look at the fundamentals of CI/CD through a new perspective, and understand how investments in observability can help you improve the performance of your CI/CD processes. We’ll conclude with a case study showing ...