Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As the size and complexity of their relational database workload grows, every company eventually goes through the process of off-loading work on a read replica. It comes with lots of benefits, but at a cost of increased complexity. This article is about how we dealt with that, a lot of learnings, and some useful techniques. incident.io is an incident management product relied on by thousands of customers to be the thing that supports them through anything from a minor blip to a full outage.

While most on-call schedules are built to represent regular rotations, often on a weekly basis, not all of your on-call needs require the same coverage every week. We’ve added Custom Shifts to the Shift-Based Schedules for maximum flexibility. Custom shifts are a feature of our new Shift-Based Schedules. With Custom Shifts, your team can cover ad hoc needs for special events, major deploys, Failure Fridays, gamedays, or whatever comes up that needs some extra coverage.

The first half of 2026 reinforced a key idea about Cloud and SaaS reliability - dependency risk. IncidentHub tracked 30,246 outages across 1,082 providers between January and June 2026. May was the busiest month, with 6,070 incidents. Cloud providers led in the total number of outages (4,723), followed closely by developer tools (4,589).

On July 16, 2026, AWS experienced a disruption in its CloudFront service, which affected a large number of websites and applications. The outage was caused by a configuration loading failure in CloudFront's VPC Origins feature. This was AWS's most widely-felt outage after last year's outage on October 20th, which caused widespread damage.

Mean time to resolution (MTTR) measures the average duration to restore regular operation for an application, service, or infrastructure component. It’s a key performance indicator (KPI) for IT incident management. To tie MTTR directly to customer satisfaction, you first need to understand how it affects service and application reliability and availability. From there, you can make informed decisions, operate efficiently, and provide a seamless customer experience.

Many teams invest heavily in code quality, architecture and testing – yet still struggle with outages, slow response times, and unclear ownership. The reason is simple: software quality is about more than technology alone.