What's up Doc?
Disclaimer: This page may look like a blog post but don’t be fooled, it’s totally an ad for our not-yet-existing product Aerial. Please sign-up for more info.
Here is a little challenge for you:
Can you tell the difference between those two things?
You'd think they're both architecture diagrams, equally carelessly drawn using the fantastic ExcaliDraw diagramming software, and patiently waiting for a prime real estate location on those confluence pages that a good-willed manager unceremoniously titled “documentation”.
Perhaps one of them is not going to be so lucky. Perhaps the first of these diagrams will only get its 15 minutes of fame as a png pasted in a brief Teams message, the existence of which will unmistakingly be acknowledged by kind souls sticking a few tiny hands-joined-together emojis in its corner, before it drowns in a flood of office-themed GIFs. Poor thing.
Anyway, wherever they might end up, those diagrams are likely short-lived. In about a month or two — a year at most — something will necesserily have changed in the way things are done, and invariably, not only will these diagrams be rendered obsolete, they will also become misleading — as relayers of information from a time long gone. No biggie. No one looks at those pages anyways. We’ll just update them later. Oh, and we lost the original drawing file, so...
But you are a smart reader, and you know that something is up. For the second diagram is not a mere concretion of lines assembled hastily the night before new-hire #35 takes hold of the cubicle that they will call “my desk” for next foreseeable decade. Oh no! It is so much more than that!
At this stage, I am realizing that I am overselling the idea behind the product quite a bit. It's not that awesome. But let's just pretend, Steve Jobs-style.
Oh no — I was saying — that diagram is so much more! First, you see, it is not an image. The tech-savvy among you might have realized that it actually is what us developers call an IFRAME. “A what?” I hear you mumble. Well, that thing is not an image, because it's an iframe, a window, a portal if you will, a palantir-like artefact that is bound to the deep roots of the system that it is designed to describe. What you see there is not only a picture depicting in crafty-yet-effective aesthetics how the system should ideally work, it is also an endoscopic view of that very organism allowing you to monitor in real time that the way its fluids flow between its organs is going according to plan.
I see you don't quite believe me, do you? Well, it turns out that you can try it yourself. Shameless as any growth hacker should be, I hooked up the number that is being displayed up there to the live number of people who signed up for our early access program. So yeah, you too can sign up on our main page right now and you'll see the number on your screen being incremented by one. Totally worth it.
Ok, but why?
Sure.
Our thinking here is that our little product should help solve two major problems that tech teams have.
Internal documentation about tech processes is not properly maintained.
Process monitoring as it is done nowadays is terrible.
I talked about the first point in the previous paragraphs, so let’s move on to the second problem. Since the dawn of devOps, devOps people have been focused on how things run: containerization, scalability, configuration management, and all these things that sound really complicated, while us regular developers have been watching in awe. Those devops guys really uped the game a notch. At some point, we felt like we were baking pizzas in the back of a Domino’s outlet, only to give the goods to a delivery guy who showed up in a Lambo.
Problem is: because devOps is really complicated, it also took over monitoring. Devops need to know how much CPU and RAM is being used on each machine, it needs to know if there is any networking bottleneck or drive failure, in order to make sure that things just run. Great. But that’s not at all what us developers need. We, the people, need to know where data is coming from, what transforms it, where it goes and if anything fails in the chain. Devops dashboards will tell you if something fails, but when you need to diagnose the root causes of the issue, you’re often left having to call Roberto, who’s unfortunately vacationing to an off-grid Ashram in Bhutan, in a desperate attempt to reconnect with his inner self as a way to postpone his 5th burnout this year.
Tech teams need logical monitoring. And logical monitoring is what we do.
Wait, it can also solve the dead data dependency problem!
Yes, indeed. A little bonus for you. Another area where tech teams shine is being-terrible-at-managing-data-dependencies. You know the dead code dependency problem, right? The issue that after a while you can’t really tell if a piece of code is being used or not. Well the dead data dependency problem is way worse. You can always solve the dead code dependency problem by adding a little bit of logging here and there, but you can’t really do that for data. Does anything rely on those lines in that table? Who knows? Crickets. Databases are filled with legacy tables that no one consumes but the ghost processes that feed other dead tables. I certainly wish some tool existed to solve that problem!
Wrapping up
I think a good summary of this post is that Aerial will be awesome, and you should definitely sign up to our early access program. See you soon up there.