Test in Production: A Panel Discussion on Debugging Kubernetes in Production

In the final session of April Test in Production Meetup, a panel discussion was led by Albert Wang, Senior Software Engineer at Uber. The featured speakers were Michael McKay from IBM and Andrew Seigner from Bouyant. They discussed deploying using Kubernetes and feature flags at scale, as well as debugging Kubernetes clusters in production. Michael McKay shared how his team uses feature flags for sending their deployments and how they keep deployment feature flags separate from business logic feature flags within services. Andrew Seigner explained the process of debugging Kubernetes clusters using a proxy layer. The discussion also touched upon the use of distributed tracing, which provides more detailed information about service behavior but requires application code changes. The panelists emphasized that their approach to observability and visibility is based on pushing all data to one place for easy access. They also mentioned how they modeled their visibility part off GitHub's practices, including checking Twitter feeds for potential issues after deployment.