#136

Apr 25, 2021

Work

This week the team had a “firebreak”, a week of doing whatever you want so long as it’s useful. I spent the time improving healthchecks for GOV.UK’s apps.

The way our healthchecks used to work had a few problems:

So I worked through our ~50 apps, implementing separate liveness and readiness healthchecks, and implementing new alerts for those not-healthchecks which had proliferated. I still need to deploy the monitoring configuration change, and then the AWS load balancer configuration change. I hope to get that done on Monday morning, then I can go through all the apps again and delete the old /healthcheck endpoint.

While it wasn’t a very exciting piece of work (opening 50 almost identical PRs doesn’t stretch the creative muscles much), it was satisfying to work through, and to put GOV.UK in a slightly better place. Now, if only our monitoring system wasn’t so old…

Books

This week I read: