Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Autonomous vehicles are all over the media these days. But what of the technologies that make them possible? In a previous blog post, we covered the many fascinating use cases for digital twins and their applications for the development of self-driving cars. But with the race towards autonomy becoming fiercer, the costs to use these new enabling technologies are rising exponentially. Moreover, the need for talent and experts across the world is forcing companies to shift to remote work.

For server administrators tasked with ensuring the reliable operation of their web applications, the thought of a lurking cyberattack can be one to lose sleep over. An attack on your system and the services you provide could render your web applications unresponsive. What’s worse, important information that depends on privacy and the careful storing of data is put at risk.

At first, the benefits of public cloud adoption are clearly recognisable: newfound agility through an all-you-can-eat and on demand buffet of services, platforms, and infrastructure. But without appropriate monitoring, guardrails and process changes, this can change fast. While the perception is that cloud offers unlimited scalability and lower costs by only charging for the resources you use, the truth is that customers pay for the resources they order, whether they use them or not.

Web servers are among the most important components in modern IT infrastructures. They host the websites, web services, and web applications that we use on a daily basis. Social networking, media streaming, software as a service (SaaS), and other activities wouldn’t be possible without the use of web servers. And with the advent of cloud computing and the movement of more services online, web servers and their monitoring are only becoming more important.

We’re fortunate enough to speak to a huge number of companies about their incident management processes. In doing so, we’ve noticed an emergent trend in how modern companies are using software to support their incident management processes, and a common set of challenges faced by them too.

The HTTP protocol has become the de facto standard application layer protocol of the internet. From publicly available web sites and APIs to “inter-process” communications in REST based microservice architectures or large Service Oriented Architectures based on SOAP, you find HTTP being used again and again, due to its simplicity and our familiarity with it. How many protocols can you name that have memes for their status codes?

We are in 2022, Platform Engineering is a fast-emerging concept at the intersection of DevOps and SRE, where the goal is to make developers from organizations to be completely autonomous in provisioning new applications and environments. All of that without requiring one to be an infrastructure expert. In this article, I will explain what DevOps Engineers need to do to become proficient Platform Engineers.