Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The rapid pace of updates and upgrades to operating systems, software frameworks, libraries, programming language versions – a boon to the future of fast-paced software development, has also come to slightly bite us in the back because of having to manage these very many dependencies with their different versions across different environments.

For many software engineers and developers, using standard libraries or built-in objects is just not enough. To save time and increase efficiency, most developers build on work done by others. Whatever the coding problem, there is likely another programmer who has already created a solution for it. There is usually no need to repeat the problem-solving process. This principle is known as Do not Repeat Yourself or DRY.

An on-call schedule tells you and everyone in the team who will be the first responder when an issue happens in production. The on-call team member is responsible for investigating the issue, either fixing the issue herself or adding other people who can help fix it. Having an on-call schedule is important for building reliable systems because making someone responsible for production issues makes sure that they're not ignored.

Adding alerts across your monitoring tools is taking a proactive approach to reliability. But if there are too many alerts, then it can become counterproductive because team members will start ignoring alerts or remove the alerting altogether. Which is why you need a systematic approach to adding alerts and dealing with them.

DevOps has great potential; when it’s done right, it offers organizations improved collaboration, quick innovation, better quality, and shorter delivery cycles. But the reality is that some businesses don’t carry the DevOps process through to the data layer.

If you shudder thinking about compilation for different platforms, I know the feeling. One of the Java promises, the WORA (Write Once, Run Anywhere) principle, while revolutionizing platform independence, it stopped short of one more step – to be able to deploy anywhere. Personally, I think that WORADA sounds awesome, but I guess before Docker it didn’t occur to people that eliminating “works on my machine” is as simple as shipping your machine.

One of the advantages that Ubuntu brings to the cloud equation is improving an organization’s ability to run in multiple clouds. Running containers on top of Ubuntu further increases portability. Mist is an open-source multi-cloud management platform that helps teams centrally manage and control their Ubuntu instances across many different cloud environments and/or bare metal. This removes some of the operational and financial barriers to running applications in multiple clouds.

Businesses are always looking for ways to increase efficiency and eliminate waste. For software-driven companies, DevOps is one approach that helps to achieve this. The goal of DevOps is faster software delivery to the end-user while maintaining high software quality. DevOps enhances collaboration between operations and development teams for faster code deployment. When evaluating the effectiveness of your DevOps model, it is critical to use metrics relevant to your organization.

Kubernetes can bring a wide collection of advantages to a development organization, but efficiently deploying applications to Kubernetes is something many organizations are still working to perfect. Properly using Kubernetes can significantly improve productivity, empower you to better utilize your cloud spend, and improve application stability and reliability. On the flip side, if you are not properly leveraging Kubernetes, your would-be benefits become drawbacks.