Case Study: Backblaze speeds debugging and reduces frustration with Rookout

Rookout transforms how Backblaze engineers develop

Backblaze, a leading cloud storage and backup provider, faced a major debugging challenge across more than 2,000 production instances. With strict limits on pushing new code and adding log lines, engineers often had to wait hours or days to gather the information needed to diagnose issues, and reproducing problems in staging was frequently hit-or-miss.

Rookout helped Backblaze speed up debugging by letting engineers add ad-hoc variable requests and inspect code behavior in staging and production without waiting for traditional log-line deployments. With Rookout, the team found root causes in minutes instead of hours, reduced frustration, and began using the tool several times daily; deployment across 2,000+ instances was fast, friction-free, and had negligible performance impact.

Backblaze

Adam Feder

Principal Engineer