Best Practices for Observable Microservice Application Development

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Observability is the ability to gain insight into the behavior of a system by collecting and analyzing data from its components. In the context of microservices, observability is crucial for identifying and resolving issues quickly.

When developing an observable microservice application, there are two actions that must be taken:

1. Know the state of a single instance of a single service: This means that developers must have a way to monitor the health and performance of individual microservices. This can be achieved by implementing health checks, which provide information on the status of a service and whether it's able to handle requests. By knowing the state of a single instance of a single service, developers can quickly identify when a service is down or experiencing issues.

2. Use distributed tracing techniques: Microservices are often distributed across multiple servers and environments, making it challenging to trace the flow of requests and responses between them. Distributed tracing techniques allow developers to track a request as it flows through the system, including all the microservices involved. This enables developers to identify bottlenecks and latency issues, as well as understand the impact of a service failure on the overall system.

While placing try/except statements and log statements in the code can be helpful for debugging and troubleshooting, they are not specific to observability and are not necessarily required for developing an observable microservice application. Similarly, deploying microservices to multiple datacenters may improve availability and resiliency, but it is not a requirement for observability.