Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Sponsored Post

Five things your logs will never tell you

A customer escalation hit my queue when I was on the customer smoke jumpers team at an observability vendor. My team was the group that parachutes into Fortune 500 accounts one bad week from churning and usually after a big customer outage. The customer had filed a billing dispute three weeks earlier and their on-call engineers were stuck. They had our full stack: logs, metrics, traces, end-to-end instrumentation, every product we sold and some we didn't. They could see the request came in. They could see it returned a 500. They could not see the body. The trace was sampled out. The log line was truncated at 4KB.

Beware of PII in Testing Data: The Security Iceberg and Where PII Actually Hides

If you run a platform tools or security team, you have likely heard this request from developers: “I just need a copy of the production database for staging so I can run realistic load and integration tests.” It is a completely reasonable request. Production traffic and data contain the actual request shapes, real-world value distributions, long-tail anomalies, and timing patterns that make tests useful.

Build WireMock mappings fast from real traffic

I’m a big fan of service mocking. I’ve been working in and around software for about 25 years, and one thing never changes: when you sit down to work on your code, you almost never have everything available. The database, the third-party API, the message queue, the service two teams over. Something’s missing. So you’ve got to stub it out or mock it out and keep moving.

Capture once, test forever

We’ve gotten used to understanding our applications through signals, summaries, and traces. Tiny little bits of information about how the app really works. Not because that’s the best way to do it, but because it’s been too hard to get the real thing. The real information exists. It’s on the network. How people called your app and what your code did. What other systems it called, the database queries it made, and the result sets that came back.

Fixing 403 auth errors when you replay traffic

Trigger warning: this one is about Java, authentication, and Docker Compose files. If that is not your thing, I am sorry, but they are part of life and they are honestly not that hard to work with. Everything here is open source on our GitHub repo, so you can follow along. Recording an authenticated Java flow, replaying it, hitting the dreaded 403, and fixing it with a proxymock recommendation.

We won't train on your data is not a security architecture

Every enterprise contract I’ve signed in the last two years has the same clause. “Vendor will not use Customer Data to train machine learning models.” Sometimes it’s a paragraph. Sometimes it’s a whole section. The language varies but the intent is identical: don’t feed our production data into your AI. I get it. I sign the same clause as a vendor. But here’s what’s been bothering me: that clause is a promise, not an architecture.

Validate Spring Boot Upgrades with Traffic Replay

Spring Boot version upgrades—whether moving from 2.x to 3.x, 3.x to 4.x, or even minor bumps like 3.2.5 to 3.3.1—regularly introduce subtle, breaking changes that unit and integration tests miss. JSON serialization shifts, autoconfiguration reordering, and transitive dependency conflicts can silently alter your API contract.

The AI Code Explosion: Why Your Mocking Strategy is Breaking Down

The rise of AI-assisted coding has transformed how software is built. With tools generating entire features in seconds, the bottleneck is no longer writing code—it’s verifying it. Because AI can generate boilerplate and handle API integrations instantly, more service changes are being pushed into authentication logic, API calls, and configurations. Teams desperately need a way to verify these changes before merging, especially when the code touches external dependencies.

Testing AI Code is a Security Nightmare? #Speedscale #DevOps #Kubernetes #AICoding #SoftwareTesting

AI can write a feature in seconds, but where are you testing it? Sending production traffic, API payloads, and auth headers to a third-party SaaS is a massive security risk. In this video, we break down why the Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) model is the ultimate fix for DevSecOps. Learn how to safely test AI-generated code against real production traffic entirely within your own VPC or Kubernetes cluster. No data leaks, no massive DLP pipelines, and no endless masking rules.

The Bug Hiding in Your Production Traffic

Your logs showed 500 errors. The traces showed the dependency graph. Neither showed the actual bug, a DEL control character getting appended to the query string. This is how I found it. In this video I walk through Speedscale BYOC (bring your own cloud): capture real production traffic, store it in your own Elasticsearch cluster inside your VPC, pull it down locally with a single script, and reproduce the exact bug using proxymock. The data never leaves your environment.

Logs told me something broke. Traffic showed me what.

Here’s a problem I run into constantly: something breaks in production, I can see the 500 errors in my logs, but I can’t reproduce it locally. The trace shows me the dependency graph but not the actual request that failed. This is especially painful in microservices. I was looking at a CNCF example the other day (a simple demo app, like 4 pods) and it already had so many cross-service dependencies that understanding what broke required looking at the whole system at once.

Your AI agent is fixing the wrong service

Everyone wants an AI agent factory in 2026. Autonomous agents fixing bugs and shipping features while you sleep. I’ve been building toward that myself. But the error rates don’t support the fantasy. The best AI coding agents in the world fix about 50% of real bugs on SWE-bench verified. Half the time they fail. And AI-generated code produces 1.7x more issues than human-written code.