Charity, Christine, Ben, and Ian began using Scuba at Facebook in 2012 in order to diagnose complex problems with the multi-tenant systems of the Parse acquisition. The columnar, in-memory data store, despite being fronted by a user-hostile UI, was lightning-fast and completely unlike the traditional log analytics or metrics TSDB systems that they’d used before. Upon leaving in 2016, they created Honeycomb to enable teams at non-FAANG companies to benefit from the modern approach to analytics and observability they’d seen at Facebook. In this talk, you’ll learn about how Honeycomb’s columnar datastore, named Retriever, uses commodity blob storage and serverless functions to achieve the same kind of fast iteration speed, and is coupled with an intuitive user interface.