Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

It's not like it used to be back in the day! Before CI/CD, we were building on-premises, service-oriented products following system style architecture and we were able to map out the build system and end-to-end process in a PowerPoint or Visio document. Although time-consuming and inefficient, it was relatively straightforward and the build pipeline was unlikely to change drastically. But that's no longer the case.

Thanks to the power of open source tooling and cloud services, shipping an application to production has never been that easy, In this blog post, we are going to go from bootstrapping a Next.js application to deploying it on Vercel. We will use Github Action to handle the Continuous Integration and Sentry to monitor the application once it is deployed to be warned of any problems as soon as it arrives.

A quick search of the internet will reveal many services available for freely hosting single page applications or static sites. Firebase is one of these services. Firebase is a development platform developed by Google that provides file storage, hosting, database, authentication, and analytics. It is free, provides an SSL certificate by default, and offers impressive speed across multiple regions. I have chosen Firebase for hosting our demo application in this tutorial.

For decades, IT operations teams have relied on monitoring for insight into the availability and performance of their systems. But the shift to more advanced IT technologies and practices is driving the need for more than monitoring – and so observability evolved. With infrastructures and applications that span multiple dynamic, distributed and modular IT environments, organizations need a deeper, more precise understanding of everything that happens within these systems.

The traditional embedded Linux development model ties applications to the OS. Such a constraint means apps have to target a specific release, which lowers development velocity. Furthermore, broken upgrades in one part of the device may affect refreshes in the rest of the OS. On the other hand, embedded developers are increasingly looking at open-source software to enable rapid app-centric software deployment and global collaboration.