Platform engineering started appearing in 2017 and was identified as a distinct DevOps role in 2019 in the book Team Topologies. Adoption quickly accelerates, and by 2022, there are platform engineering meetups worldwide, and over 6,000 DevOps professionals attend Platform Con, the first platform engineering conference. With such a fast rise in popularity, many technology professionals still need clarification on the role and how it fits into the DevOps methodology.

IT pros need tools designed to ingest large volumes of data, correlate events across data sources, detect problems, and resolve them with new technologies to support more efficient IT systems. This is the function of AIOps. AIOps or Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations, is the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies to enhance and automate various aspects of IT.

In my first post, I talked about how SQL Sentry has taken shape over the years. Now we announced SQL Sentry 2023.3, and a lot is changing. In the past, customers could only work with SQL Sentry through an installed, Windows-based client. It’s a feature-rich interface with access to everything you need with no limit to how many users install it. But we heard our customers; they wanted a web-based interface with a simplified user experience.

In August, a ransomware attack hit another company. Unfortunately, it hit a regional cloud provider in Europe this time, and we can call this a “critical hit.” So far, we know a virtual server got compromised and used as a jump host; from there, the attacker started to encrypt all volumes in the same domain. Based on pure luck or some profound reconnaissance, the same server migrated into a different data center and continued its unplanned job from there.