Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

You probably use many tools to get through the day. Do you ever wonder what tools get other people through their days? In our Tools This Engineer Uses series, we explore the routines, systems, and tools your peers rely on to solve problems and accomplish goals.

When I browse Stackery’s documentation and blog, I see some great writing that I know not everyone has read. Check out these great articles essential to growth as a developer.

At Datadog, we operate 40+ Kafka and ZooKeeper clusters that process trillions of datapoints across multiple infrastructure platforms, data centers, and regions every day. Over the course of operating and scaling these clusters to support increasingly diverse and demanding workloads, we’ve learned a lot about Kafka—and what happens when its default behavior doesn’t align with expectations.

It all started with monolith architecture; business logic, user interfaces, and data layers were stored in one big program. As tightly coupled applications, a simple update to the program meant recompiling the entire application and redistributing the program to all users. That led to the difficulty of maintaining consistent program versions and distribution across all clients in order to ensure stability and alignment. This made the monolith approach inefficient and cumbersome.

Making the move to DevOps can be a daunting undertaking, with many organizations not knowing where to start. I recently had some fun taking a few DevOps assessments to see what solutions are currently in the market. I varied my answers from an organization that fully embraced DevOps to an organization at the beginning of its journey.

These days, a major part of most IT budgets is the cloud bill. But unlike server-bound infrastructure budgeting, cloud bills can be unpredictable and highly variable from month to month. However, if organizations embrace cloud cost optimization to regulate cloud bills and avoid surprises, they’ll find themselves with considerable found money that can be reinvested into other areas.