Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Automating processes and the tools that enable them is vital for empowering highly productive teams. The right automation tools and workflows help DevOps and SRE teams minimize repetitive tasks, improve monitoring capabilities, enable continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD), and work with massive volumes of data.

During the recent security incident, CircleCI CTO Rob Zuber’s response included posting in our Discuss community, where users can contact company employees directly to ask questions and provide feedback.

The first post in this series introduced the idea of the different layers of value that your business can gain from frequent deployments and focused on the hard costs you can save. We’re looking at the role the database plays here because it’s the most complicated part of the process and it’s difficult to hit aggressive KPIs and goals when your teams are burdened with process bloat due to mistake-prone, manual work.

Toil. Few other words have the same visceral impact for SREs as their four-letter nemesis: toil. Although pretty much everyone recognizes and agrees that toil is bad, it is a term that is frequently misused in colloquial use. In common English usage, toil is defined as “long strenuous fatiguing labor”. As a term of art in the SRE profession, “toil” has several very specific characteristics which distinguish it from other sorts of work which people spend time on.

How can enterprises streamline their operations for improved internal efficiency and customer satisfaction? The right combination of DevOps tools will do just that.

Companies face multiple challenges when migrating their applications and services to the cloud, and one of them is infrastructure management. The ideal scenario would be that all workloads could be containerized. In that case, the organization could use a Kubernetes-based service, like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud or Azure, to deploy and manage applications, services and storage in a cloud native environment. Unfortunately, this scenario isn’t always possible.

In a world where everyone across the enterprise requires the network, the Infrastructure & Operations (I&O) team has a lot on their plate. Business units, departments, and even individual employees often need to spin up new network resources in order to do their work, take advantage of new business opportunities, and focus on innovation. As the gatekeepers of the network, it’s up to the I&O team to facilitate these connections.

There are so many interesting and very useful Azure services out there. Over my time in the IT industry, I have seen the evolution of virtualization and eventually the cloud. It has been very interesting to follow the growth and evolution of Azure, and the introduction of Azure Synapse is a great example of how cloud services grow and evolve. Through using Azure, organizations can do things they never thought possible in the traditional data center.