Imagine you’re building the UI. You need to connect to remote API to get or send some data. Everything works fine when you test your REST calls with curl, but when you implement them in the UI, it does not.

For consumers, the speed of technological progress is magical, because of what’s suddenly become possible: self-driving cars, same-day delivery, movies and television shows streamed to us anywhere, anytime.

As I described in my previous blog post on the key principles to guide a microservices project, the efficiency of the value chain determines costs, affects profit, and ultimately decides whether a business will reach its goals. It becomes very important to know if the changes we apply to the system—for example, the introduction of a microservice to implement a value-chain step—have positive or negative consequences on the overall system.

In my previous two blog posts, I explored two principles that are at the heart of DevOps: systems thinking and amplifying feedback loops. In this post, we’ll discuss the third and final principle, a culture of experimentation and learning, which is the direct and most compelling effect of the first two principles.