Packets don’t lie

What people believe vs reality is a lot of times different. Take for example your application architecture. What was documented in the past may not be a true reflection of the present.

How to address this problem? A few things I like to use are:

1. Shell into a pod if you are running k8s (or ssh into a vm/physical box), and look at your runtime environment variables
2. Use network tools like a packet trace to see where connections really are
3. Application performance monitoring tools that show interconnected services

I would trust #2 more than #1 since “packets don’t lie.”