At a recent SRE Meetup in Bangalore, we had the pleasure of meeting Akshay Deshpande. During our conversation, Akshay, who manages a Performance/Observability Engineering team at Smarsh discussed his passion for observability and his constant drive to improve the field. Smarsh helps companies gain valuable insights from their communication data, enabling them to proactively identify potential regulatory and reputational risks before they escalate.

Traditional database design prioritizes data integrity through normalization. However, for read-heavy workloads, normalized data structures can lead to complex queries and slower performance. Denormalization offers an alternative approach to optimize query execution and improve efficiency. A study concluded that denormalization can improve query performance when implemented with a thorough understanding of application requirements.

I was out there in sunny Austin this February, speaking at Civo Navigate 2024. The event was jam packed with amazing talks, and it was great meeting so many people with long and fascinating careers in engineering and Site Reliability. I had the privilege of meeting Bob Lee, who currently leads DevOps at Twingate — a cloud-based service that provides secured remote access, and poised to replace VPNs.

I was out there in sunny Austin this February, speaking at Civo Navigate 2024. The event was jam packed with amazing talks, and it was great meeting so many people with long and fascinating careers in engineering and Site Reliability. I had the privilege of meeting Bob Lee, who currently leads DevOps at Twingate — a cloud-based service that provides secured remote access, and poised to replace VPNs.

The digital world comes with advantages and inherent risks. These IT incidents, which can encompass cyberattacks, system outages, and data breaches, can have a devastating impact. Beyond financial losses, IT incidents disrupt business operations, damage reputations, and erode customer trust. During an outage, having a well-prepared Incident Response Team (IRT) is essential to reduce downtime and improve response times.

We’ve come a long way from the first On-call schedule editor we built, and this new release takes the user experience for Zenduty Schedules a hundred steps further! (…103 steps further precisely, says our internal changelog)

The pressure to constantly innovate and release new features can often clash with the need for a stable and reliable product. While there might be some temporary cutbacks in testing time to achieve high feature velocity, ensuring reliability doesn't have to be an afterthought. We reached out to industry experts to gather their insights on ensuring reliability during phases that demand high feature velocity. Here's what they had to say.

External dependencies and third-party services play a crucial role in powering modern applications. These components bring a wealth of benefits, ranging from access to specialized tools and resources to the ability to offload non-core tasks, allowing development teams to focus on delivering value-added features.