I want to start with a moment most of us have lived through.
It's 3 a.m. A dashboard is red. You're eight terminals deep in grep, trying to work out which service actually fell over and why. And the whole time there's this nagging feeling that you're doing archaeology on a system you wrote last month.
Here's what got under my skin about it. The answer was never actually lost. Back in the source code it said, in plain terms, that the payment service talks to Postgres through a connection pool. That this retry backs off three times. That this particular dependency is external and you must never, ever try to "just restart it." That was all right there at build time. Then we packaged everything up, deployed, threw that structure in the bin, and asked a sleep-deprived human to reconstruct it from log lines.
That gap bugged me enough that I spent a while building something around it. This post is about that.
Autoscaling is good at the wrong problem
