Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Due to a great synergy between our products, I am happy to announce that Cloudflare and appfleet are joining forces! The appfleet platform is shutting down, with all clusters going offline on October 31st 2021.

In the daily life of a Site Reliability Engineer, the main goal is to reduce all the work we call toil. But what is toil? Toil is the kind of work tied to running a production service that tends to be manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical, devoid of enduring value, and scales linearly as a service grows. This blog post describes our journey to automate our nodes rotation process when we have a new AMI release and the open source tools we built on this.

Virtualization and cloud have forced the need for automation. In the “old” days, it would take weeks for a new physical server to arrive. There was little pressure to install and configure the operating system on it rapidly. We would insert a disc into the drive and then follow our checklist. A few days later, it would be ready to use. But the ability to spin up new virtual machines (VMs) in minutes required us to get better at automating this process.

Virtual machines (VMs) have transformed infrastructure deployment and management. VMs are so ubiquitous that I can’t think of a single instance where I deployed production code to a bare metal server in my many years as a professional software engineer. VMs provide secure, isolated environments hosting your choice of operating system while sharing the resources of the underlying server. This allows resources to be allocated more efficiently, reducing the cost of over-provisioned hardware.

We're excited to announce Civo Academy: A full Kubernetes learning program consisting of over 50 videos created in-house by the team here at Civo.

IT Pro Day has always been about singing the praises of practitioners across the vast spectrum of tech specialties, from network engineers and systems administrators; to infosec analysts and developers; to storage and virtualization admins; and even to monitoring specialists (whether that’s your whole job or just part of a much longer list of responsibilities). But an important question we should consider is what, exactly, prepared you for this career?