Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Load balancing means splitting up network traffic so that you can distribute it evenly across a group of backend servers. For example, if you run two web servers, both hosting a copy of the same website, then you can balance the traffic across them, sending half to one and half to the other. The goal of load balancing is to increase the availability of your website or web-based application by routing a portion of requests to each server.

Companies that want to take care of their customers have to invest in a Customer Success team and define the right strategy (Thanks Rav Dhaliwal for your help here). Thinking about customer success is typically something that happens much later (too late?) after the Sales efforts. Growth pressure on startups puts effort in the sales machine to close as many customers as possible while forgetting that growth comes from the current customers. A happy customer is less likely to churn.

The container orchestration service Kubernetes has taken cloud-native application hosting by storm. By automating infrastructure tasks, Kubernetes—an open-source system designed by Google—simplifies the technical work of application deployment, scaling, and management. Managed Kubernetes services take this process a step further, handling more of the management tasks so that engineers can focus more time and resources on developing apps.

For our Rails/Rack customers, the latest Ruby release v3.1.0 is now available. This is brand new, and Gems are still catching up, so please ensure your application works with this version locally before upgrading. For more information, see the official release notes.

Mattermost v6.3 (Extended Support Release) is generally available today and includes the following new features (see changelog for more details).

An overview of major IT incidents and outages in 2021

Using CircleCI’s orbs is a great way to share CI/CD configuration across projects. Public orbs work well for wide adoption, but private orbs have been helpful for organizations needing to share common internal configuration in a secure, non-public way. Private orbs work only within the organization that publishes them. We recently opened up private orbs access to all CircleCI customers, including those on the Free plan.