Meet the Author

Liz Fong-Jones
Field CTO
Liz is a developer advocate, labor and ethics organizer, and Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) with over two decades of experience. She is currently the Field CTO at Honeycomb, and previously was an SRE working on products ranging from the Google Cloud Load Balancer to Google Flights.
Explore Author's Blog

The Most Important Developer Productivity Metric
At Honeycomb, we believe in ensuring an awesome developer experience for our own engineering teams; it’s the only way that we can compete with companies that have way more engineers than we do. We’ve historically tried to keep our build times under 15 minutes, taking percussive action when build times got over 15 minutes.

Debugging Kubernetes Autoscaling with Honeycomb Log Analytics
Let’s be real, we’ve never been huge fans of conventional unstructured logs at Honeycomb. From the very start, we’ve emitted from our own codestructured wide events and distributed traces with well-formed schemas. Fortunately (because it avoids reinventing the wheel) and unfortunately (because it doesn’t adhere to our standards for observability) for us, not all the software we run is written by us. And Kubernetes is a prime example of such a load-bearing part of our infrastructure.

Why Every Engineering Team Should Embrace AWS Graviton4
Two years ago, we shared our experiences with adopting AWS Graviton3 and our enthusiasm for the future of AWS Graviton and Arm. Once again, we’re privileged to share our experiences as a launch customer of the Amazon EC2 R8g instances powered by AWS Graviton4, the newest generation of AWS Graviton processors.

Framework for an Observability Maturity Model: Using Observability to Advance Your Engineering & Product
Everyone’s talking about “observability,” but many don’t know what it is, what it’s for, or what benefits it offers. With this framing of observability in terms of goals instead of tools, we hope teams will have better language for improving what their organization delivers and how they deliver it.

5-Star OTel: OpenTelemetry Best Practices
Recently, Honeycomb held a roundtable discussion (available on demand) with Camal Cakar, Senior Site Reliability Engineer at Jimdo; Pierre Lacerte, Director of Software Development at Upgrade; and Kristin Smith, DevOps Engineer at Campspot. We talked about using OpenTelemetry and explained some important lessons the panelists learned—and are still learning in some cases. Here are five best practices based on these lessons and Honeycomb’s own experience with OpenTelemetry.

Authors’ Cut—Gear up! Exploring the Broader Observability Ecosystem of Cloud-Native, DevOps, and SRE
You know that old adage about not seeing the forest for the trees? In our Authors’ Cut series, we’ve been looking at the trees that make up the observability forest—among them, CI/CD pipelines, Service Level Objectives, and the Core Analysis Loop. Today, I’d like to step back and take a look at how observability fits into the broader technical and cultural shifts in technology: cloud-native, DevOps, and SRE.

Authors’ Cut—No More Pipeline Blues: Accelerate CI/CD with Observability
Just like any aspect of development, poor integration, invisible bottlenecks, and bugs can plague your CI/CD pipelines. And debugging them? Well, it’s complicated. To see what I mean, just fire up your favorite search engine to find content on “debugging CI/CD pipelines.” Look at all the different tools, studios, and blogs full of advice—it’s soul crushing.



Game Launches Should Be Exciting for Your Players, Not for Your LiveOps Team
This blog was co-authored by Amy Davis. The moment of launching something new at a game studio (titles, experiences, features, subscriptions) is a blockbuster moment that hangs in the balance. The architecture—distributed and complex,…