Testing web applications from the user interface (UI) is a must for every customer-facing product, from e-commerce portals to cyber security dashboards. Often, a broken or inefficient UI experience can make or break whether end users adopt a product quickly and trouble-free. This is why developers have embraced UI testing as a critical part of their development process.

Joining a new dev team can be an exciting but somewhat intimidating experience. On one hand, you’re jumping into new adventures and opportunities. On the other hand, most onboarding experiences are fraught with stress and a sense of overwhelming from how much you have to learn, fast, to be able to contribute to your new team. To be honest, I’d never worked at a place where the developer onboarding experience was particularly memorable – until I joined Helios.

With the introduction of container orchestration frameworks like Kubernetes, the adoption of cloud-native technologies, and the transition to microservices architectures, engineering organizations were empowered to build scalable and complex applications. DevOps engineers have had an indispensable role in this revolution, enabling and supporting these processes.

I’m excited to share that today, we’re making Helios available to all developers around the world for free. Helios is a developer platform that helps increase dev velocity and productivity when building cloud-native applications. Over the past few months we’ve worked closely with dozens of private beta users to build a product that we believe will make a difference.

In distributed application environments, to solve problems in code you need to be able to connect the dots between all the different places where your code runs, including frameworks like Databricks and Apache Airflow. The Databricks pipeline may be one of the most crucial places where your code runs, but the visibility you’re getting there is limited.

Testing today’s environments is more challenging than it was a few years ago. The transition to distributed environments has created complexity, overhead, and friction when writing and running new backend tests. These tests require a lot of preparation, infrastructure building, and maintenance since many services communicate asynchronously and they often miss exceptions that are thrown on the “deeper layer” of the system architecture and it’s hard to make it testable.

Within the technology stack used by developers today you would be hard-pressed not to find products and features that save time. Time-saving tools are crucial for developers because we look for ways to deliver production-ready code faster to keep up with the demands of our users and customers. We want to be able to identify, reproduce, and fix issues – fast.

OpenTelemetry (OTel) is an emerging industry standard that dev teams use to instrument, generate, collect, and export telemetry to better understand software performance and behavior. At Helios, we leverage OTel to provide developers with actionable insights into their code within distributed systems. We give them visibility into how data flows through their applications, enabling them to quickly identify, reproduce and debug issues in their flows.

“Cloud native” – working in distributed systems using microservices and DevOps – has promised a lot, and indeed delivered a lot. Among the biggest benefits, in a cloud-native distributed architecture it’s easier and more cost-effective to scale parts of an application. When one part fails, it is less likely to impact other services and the services can still communicate with each other.