Achieving Delivery Excellence: Centralized Workflows and Observability in Action
Scaling software delivery effectively requires two key pillars: centralized workflows and robust observability. Without them, teams face duplicated efforts, delayed troubleshooting, and slower deployments. In a recent demo, Liatrio demonstrated how shared workflows and event-driven telemetry can help development teams catch issues faster, reduce operational overhead, and drive continuous improvement.
The Problem: Workflow Duplication and Lack of Visibility
Enterprises often struggle with workflow duplication when individual teams build custom pipelines for services like Maven, Go, or Python. This duplication creates maintenance challenges, leading to significant technical debt when updates or fixes are needed across teams. Our solution involves treating shared workflows as a centrally managed product, where teams can contribute improvements while benefiting from consistency and streamlined updates.
Another issue arises from limited observability within CI/CD processes. Bugs in build pipelines or feature flag misconfigurations can go unnoticed until they cause major disruptions. We addressed this by integrating observability directly into CI/CD workflows, ensuring teams can detect and resolve problems before they escalate.
Scenario 1: Enabling Observability in Application Development
We showcased a smooth development process using Backstage starter kits. Developers created a Golang service and onboarded it to observability tools. Feature flags, implemented using FlagD and OpenFeature, introduced a controlled failure rate (1-in-10 requests) to simulate real-world issues. We then stress-tested the setup using K6 load testing.
As failures accumulated, our service-level objective (SLO) triggered Slack notifications, enabling the team to quickly investigate and resolve the issue. By analyzing traces and performance metrics, we pinpointed the root cause, minimizing the impact on availability and performance.
Scenario 2: Observability in CI/CD Workflows
On the CI/CD side, we used GitHub Actions with semantic versioning managed by Renovate to ensure that workflows and dependencies remained up to date. An OpenTelemetry collector captured traces from GitHub events, giving the team visibility into workflow failures and version-specific issues. With real-time monitoring dashboards, teams could visualize failure points, track build times, and prioritize optimizations.
This approach not only streamlined failure detection but also helped optimize build performance. As build times increased, teams could identify and address bottlenecks, ensuring faster feedback loops and improved efficiency.
Why Centralized Workflows and Observability Matter
Centralized workflows act as the backbone of efficient delivery, reducing technical debt and making updates easier to manage. When combined with observability, teams gain actionable insights into their systems, allowing them to proactively address issues, optimize performance, and improve collaboration.
By embedding observability into the software development lifecycle, teams can troubleshoot faster, automate dependency management, and deploy with confidence.
Want to transform your delivery process with shared workflows and real-time observability? Contact Liatrio today to see how we can help optimize your CI/CD pipelines and streamline software delivery.