Developers thrive when coding in an IDE. This is home. Everything exists at our fingertips. But two trends are increasingly moving code away from my laptop: distributed systems and remote teams.
The evolution of software from monolithic to distributed architectures (such as microservices and FaaS) has many benefits, including speed, flexibility, fault isolation, scalability, smaller/faster deployments, limiting vendor risk, etc. (we have heard about these thousands of times). However, this shift in infrastructure and architecture creates a tremendous amount of complexity.
“Distributed” has come to mean black boxes of minified or compiled code existing in machines, environments, or containers that are opaque at best.
Sure, I can easily troubleshoot something that I have visibility into and can reproduce, but when it is deployed elsewhere…
Let me put it this way: troubleshooting a problem in another environment is like having one shot to destroy the DeathStar while QA, customers, and management are bombarding you with slack messages and emails.
And all of this while not actually being at the battle (i.e., another environment) if that makes any sense.
So, what if you could send a transaction from any environment and replay it directly in your IDE?
Vortex allows you to see transactions happening in any environment, machine, or container, and replay the transaction wherever and whenever you want. That means that you don't have to reproduce the problem because the transaction comes right to you in your IDE. Hit replay and it hits your code.
You can now see what is going on anywhere.
It's like having the eye of Sauron for any environment.
Setting up Vortex takes only a few minutes.