So much of our world has moved away from the slow and methodical, towards the agile and iterative. In transport, for example, everything is “on demand”, constantly changing and adaptable. The same is true for developers. With movements and philosophies such as CI/CD, everything is about moving quickly, yet smartly. Test automation is an integral part of this development philosophy.

A customer of ours reported a limit on number of packets in Amazon’s EC2 instances. According to the report, it didn’t happen on all instance types, and didn’t happen all the time. Also, it was unrelated entirely to bandwidth or MTU. According to the report, packet transmission rates were limited the same as CPU on t2/t3 instances — each instance earns credits which, when exhausted, cause throttling.

Late October already – where did the year go? Well at least part of it was spent making StackStorm better, and adding new packs and actions to the StackStorm Exchange. Read on for more details about StackStorm 2.9.1, and pack updates to ManageIQ, Jira, ServiceNow, InfluxDB, vSphere, and more.

Most IT organizations like to think of themselves as continuously improving. The best ones constantly invest in building new skills, deploying new infrastructure, acquiring new tools, creating new processes, or even tuning what they already have in order to wring more efficiency and productivity out of their environments. Many are migrating to the cloud, as cloud service providers (or CSPs) cheerily advertise three, four or even five 9s of availability (e.g., 99.999% uptime).

Disaster recovery involves planning for the worst so organizations can quickly bounce back from a disruptive event. To prepare for hardware failure, power outages, human error, natural disasters — or whatever type of disaster life has in store — companies should put together a disaster recovery plan that identifies risks and outlines steps to mitigate them. For example, to minimize downtime, companies might regularly back up important data and set up redundant offsite infrastructure.

Over the years, automation has become a key component in the management of the entire software release lifecycle. Automation helps teams get code from development into the hands of users faster and more reliably. While this principle is critical to your source code and continuous integration and delivery processes, it is equally essential to the underlying infrastructure you depend on.

Enterprise IT and ISV developers are intrigued by technology benefits of containers and Kubernetes. However, when they go with a recommendation to their senior management to containerize applications, one question is asked – Why do we need to containerize? Didn’t we rehost our application to the cloud?