Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

We’re excited to share that we are celebrating our tenth podcast episode! For this episode, we invited Russell Foster. As a DevOps engineer at StackState, Russell is responsible for making sure our SaaS product runs smoothly on AWS. Over the years, Russell has worked at both startups and more mature companies, where his responsibilities ranged from keeping things up and running in cloud environments to making sure hybrid and on-premise environments remain stable and reliable.

Remember when Slack went down in early January? The three-hour outage, set off by AWS capacity issues, cost the company an untold amount of money. And the effects rippled across the enterprise. The outage devalued the company’s stock and seemed to send all 142,000 of its customers to Twitter to gripe. This high-profile outage is just the most recent of many outages highlighting the critical nature of continuous availability. And there’s only one answer to the problem.

With the 1.2.0 release of Rancher Desktop, there are two new features available as a Feature Preview. Rancher, the multi-cluster Kubernetes manager, includes a dashboard which enables you see and interact with resources in a Kubernetes cluster. Rancher Desktop now includes this dashboard. The dashboard will enable you to view and interact with resources in your local cluster provided by Rancher Desktop.

When I was making my first switch from a product engineering team to being field facing software engineer, one of my first projects was an integration project for a federal agency. The very first piece of enterprise software minus my productivity and development suite I was exposed to was BMC’s Control-M about 15 years ago. A lot of batch files to extract and transform data had to be run in order and on a daily basis; Control-M at the time was a job runner.

Scheduling is an integral part of software development practices. Tools for scheduling jobs help development teams save time by scheduling recurring tasks — like modifying a database or sending out periodic emails — for execution at specified times. There are many to choose from, including cron for Linux, scheduled tasks for Windows, launchd for macOS, Jobber, and anacron.