Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The latest News and Information on DevOps, CI/CD, Automation and related technologies.

Anything But Tech Debt

Tech debt is usually one of the most fraught topics on engineering teams. Engineers often feel they aren’t allowed enough time to address tech debt. Product partners wonder why engineers spend so much time working on it—or at least talking about it. “The business” always seems to insinuate that engineers should do less of it, instead focusing on shipping value to customers.

Using UX and Observability to Track Application Health

UX (user experience) is a core factor that determines the success of an application or platform in a distributed system. Specifically, developers need to understand the infrastructure within an entire application stack to improve and refine the user experience to meet customer expectations without guesswork. System downtime remains a significant source of revenue and reputational losses for enterprises, employees, and customers.

What is Scalability?

The number of simultaneous requests that an application can successfully support is a measure of its scalability. The point at which an application can no longer successfully handle more requests is its scalability limit. When a key piece of hardware is exhausted and new or more machines are needed, this limit is reached. Scaling these resources can include any combination of CPU and physical memory (different or more computers), hard disc (larger hard drives, less "live" data, solid state drives), and/or network bandwidth (several network interface controllers, larger NICs, fibre, and so on).

Cloud connectivity and interoperability

The post-pandemic world has transformed our work habits and the landscape of conducting business. Organizations now take the hybrid approach to work, wherein employees may work from an office, while travelling, or from a remote location. This fundamental shift has accelerated the pace of cloud adoption, as the cloud makes data access possible from anyplace, anytime. But the cloud brings with it a set of complexities that must be managed.

Securing Access to Cloud Native Resources with Certificates - Civo Navigate NA 2023

In this talk, Alan Vailliencourt, a Senior Solutions Engineer with Teleport, discusses the importance of moving away from passwords and securing access to cloud-native resources using short-lived certificates. He highlights the risks associated with passwords and showcases the benefits of identity-native access, incorporating proof of presence, mutual authentication, and device security. The talk provides practical steps for adopting certificate-based authentication and improving security posture for Kubernetes, databases, and other cloud resources.

The broader approach on Azure monitoring

This episode of Azure On Air podcast tackles the challenges in IT infrastructure monitoring and transitioning from on-premise to the cloud. Pedro Sousa, Microsoft Azure MVP, advocates for a shift from traditional monitoring to a holistic observability approach, starting with an understanding of business needs and working down to infrastructure details. Furthermore, he provides invaluable advice on migrating from on-premise to Azure, emphasizing the consistency of observability principles across environments.

Using Grafana and Graphite to monitor server load

Since server outages can lead to a loss of customers, reputation, and other troubles and it is important to get information on the status of the server on time. MetricFire's Hosted Grafana and Graphite will help you monitor server load in a timely and efficient manner. Servers generate a large number of metrics and it is essential to not only track their values but also to observe their changes over time. There is also a possibility to correlate app statistics with server load metrics.