Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Database changes are inherently complex: coordinating schema updates, managing risk, and avoiding downtime all require care. Even when teams improve how they deliver those changes, governance often remains inconsistent, manual, and reactive. In many environments, governance is treated as a separate layer around deployment. Policies are applied unevenly, approvals become bottlenecks, and audit evidence is assembled after the fact, creating gaps in enforcement and increasing operational risk.

This post is also available in German and in French. Tracking environmental impact can be fragmented, time-consuming, and disconnected from operational data. Beyond simply checking ESG reporting boxes or making sure your company is CSRD compliant, actively monitoring environmental impact is the foundation for building an effective sustainability strategy. At Upsun, we know that measuring progress is the first step toward improvement.

Custom dashboards in Netdata have always let you pull charts together on-the-fly into a single view. That’s useful, but it’s also limited. In practice, when you’re running an incident or reviewing a service, you don’t just want charts. You want to see the output of top alongside your CPU metrics. You want slow query logs next to your database latency charts.

The regulatory landscape governing UK sovereign cloud security has shifted more dramatically in the past 12 months than in the preceding decade. New legislation, tightened procurement frameworks, and an intensifying cyber threat environment are collectively raising the compliance floor for organizations running cloud workloads in the UK.

Imagine if you had a magic box where you could keep all your business information — sales numbers, customer feedback, everything — safe and sound, but also easy to look at whenever you needed. That’s kind of what Snowflake does, but for big organizations and using the cloud. It’s a new way for companies to store and use their data without getting bogged down by the techy details.

If you manage more than a handful of monitors, you have probably wanted to define them in code rather than clicking through a dashboard. Terraform is the standard tool for that in the infrastructure world, and now there is a Terraform provider for Hyperping. Develeap, a DevOps consultancy, built this provider while managing monitoring for 57 tenants at scale. They needed infrastructure as code for monitors, status pages, and incidents, so they built it, tested it in production, and open-sourced it.

PayPal runs six data centers, each with around 60,000 containers. Their 30,000 employees spin up nearly 10,000 test environments every day — roughly 6 to 10 every minute. Each environment requires three config updates: one to create the virtual service, and additional calls to configure and deploy the applications. Do the math and you get a staggering 30,000 config updates per day.

Regular DR testing is no longer a compliance checkbox — it is a critical engineering discipline that determines whether an organisation can survive a real cloud outage with its services and revenue intact. As the AWS Middle East incident demonstrated, regional cloud failures can strike without warning and defeat standard redundancy models, making untested DR plans dangerously unreliable.