When I was a kid, we would head to the city to buy things, everything from a pair of shoes to new school supplies. As I grew up in the 1990s, we were introduced to a new way of shopping: malls. They were easier, the variety was bigger, and the lights were brighter. With that, our habit of street shopping mostly “died.” Over the past few years, retail has been rattled by another development: online shopping, which, according to all indications, is now killing the mall.

Hey Looker Community! I’ve missed you all in the time since the Podium. I was so glad to see smiling faces from the Community in person at JOIN: The Tour, Los Angeles. There’s something particularly great about putting faces to usernames, and I look forward to meeting more of you at future events to come.

It wasn’t a very long time ago when cloud computing was a niche field that only the most advanced organizations were dabbling with. Now the cloud is very much the mainstream, and it is rare to find a business that uses IT that doesn’t rely on it for a part of their infrastructure. But if you are going to add cloud services to your company, you will need to choose between the private cloud and the public cloud.

There’s some research that points to the Iranian New Year as the source for spring cleaning. The idea was that the end of the colder months was an opportunity to “shake the house” (khooneh tekouni) to feel renewed. Nowruz, or new day, occurs on the first day of spring and like everyone else with a New Year resolution, the concept of cleaning and renewal was about setting a fresh start. Here we are, spring build alpha already deployed in some parts of the world.

SaaS has become the de facto standard for most B2B tools and B2C applications. As a result, more and more personal and business-critical data is entrusted to third parties who in turn use various third-party solutions themselves. We have a lot more SaaS in our lives, but what about SaaS security?

Alibaba Cloud provides a comprehensive suite of cloud computing services to power businesses across the globe. We are excited to announce that our new integration with Alibaba Cloud is now in public beta. While the Datadog Agent has always been able to provide visibility into Alibaba Cloud instances, this new integration now enables you to also monitor the health and performance of Alibaba Cloud services (load balancers, managed databases, and more) in Datadog.

Two new terms have recently emerged around software delivery: Software Defined Delivery and Progressive Delivery. Why? How do they relate to Continuous Delivery?

Banks are moving to microservice architectures. This is a fact. The reality is that the best way for banks to keep up with startups like Robinhood is to “innovate faster.” While this is a buzzword, fundamentally it means pushing their offerings forward. Simply having an app isn’t enough. That app needs to do more. All of this, combined with PSD2 & Open Banking Initiatives, has led to the mass shift from legacy to RESTful API microservice architectures.