January 2025 Summaries

Karl, the Head of Platform Engineering at an e-commerce company, shared his experience with Monitoring as Code (MaC), which has transformed his team's approach to monitoring. Traditional synthetic monitoring setups, where tests are created and managed in separate consoles, led to inefficiencies such as duplicated effort, wasted resources, and disconnected monitoring from development workflows. MaC brings monitoring into the same space where developers work every day, making it easier to track costs, find tests, and integrate monitoring into daily workflows. By adopting MaC, Karl's team was able to save over $1 million in annual costs, take ownership of their tests, and make monitoring a natural part of building and running software.

We decided to move from Heroku to AWS as our hosting provider in 2022 due to issues with PostgreSQL cloud offerings available at the time, including limited support for newer versions and smaller set of supported PSQL extensions. We had to overcome challenges such as handling large-scale data migration, converting data types, and minimizing downtime during the process. The entire process took about five weeks to complete, with extensive planning and testing. We learned that using partitioned tables, setting correct timeouts, and leveraging learnings from the migration are key takeaways for others attempting a similar project. A successful migration hinges on detailed planning, clear communication, extensive testing, balancing risk and downtime, and leveraging learnings.