For this episode we’re continuing to “Build Things on Purpose” with JJ Tang, co-founder of Rootly, who joins us to talk about incident response, the tool he’s built, and his many lessons learned from incidents. Rootly is aiming to automate some of the more tedious work around incidents, and keeping that consistency. JJ chats about why he and his co-founder built Rootly, and the problems they’re trying to fix and eliminate when it comes to reliability.

Testing is crucial in the software development phase. It helps ensure easy debugging, agile code, and enhanced reusability. Performing tests that cover all use cases helps prevent a codebase from breaking — minimizing exposure to vulnerabilities. Python has two main testing frameworks that developers can use, doctest and unittest.

Migrating your applications from on-prem infrastructure to the cloud comes with a number of benefits, including increased agility, resilience, and scalability, as well as potential cost and IT overhead reductions. But it can be complex, which is why organizations moving to Azure often use Microsoft’s Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure and its strategy for successful migrations.

One of my teammates calls change management the "eat your vegetables of ITSM." Just like eating veggies is important for getting nutrients and staying healthy, there is good reason to practice change management — the need for coordination between sometimes misaligned teams and regulatory requirements. Of course, we all know getting our greens can be unappetizing. It's not unlike the often bitter process of navigating complex, slow, and bureaucratic change management systems.

Recently microservices-based applications became very popular and with the rise of microservices, the concept of Service Mesh also became a very hot topic. Unfortunately, there are only a few articles about this concept and most of them are hard to digest.

In the era of Microservices, Cloud Computing and Serverless architecture, it’s useful to understand Kubernetes and learn how to use it. However, the official Kubernetes documentation can be hard to decipher, especially for newcomers. In this blog series, I will present a simplified view of Kubernetes and give examples of how to use it for deploying microservices using different cloud providers, including Azure, Amazon, Google Cloud and even IBM.

Businesses both small and large use cloud services to help maintain their data. But managing cloud services — and making sure you stay within your budget — can be a challenge. To maximize your money, you need to focus on one thing: efficiency. If you can be efficient with your time and finances, getting your cloud services up and running will be a breeze.