Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

At Google Cloud, we strive to bring Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) culture to our customers not only through training on organizational best practices, but also with the tools you need to run successful cloud services. Part and parcel of that is comprehensive observability tooling—logging, monitoring, tracing, profiling and debugging—which can help you troubleshoot production issues faster, increase release velocity and improve service reliability.

We recently ran a quick poll where we asked the audience, “When an IT incident occurs at your company, what TV show does it most resemble?” Twenty-three percent of respondents told us that CSI: Crime Scene Investigation resembled them the most. We needed to dig into that a little deeper. Let’s walk through the typical steps of figuring out the root cause, in CSI fashion: Photographs are critical in the world of CSI.

As companies are increasingly built in the cloud, cost management has become a major issue for many engineering teams. While cloud providers like AWS offer flexibility and easy scaling, cloud costs can be opaque and difficult to track. As a result, many companies that rely on the cloud are adopting cloud cost management strategies to understand and manage the charges associated with their cloud-based technology, and maximize cloud usage and efficiency.

On October 22, 2020, Shipa launched a new web series called “Coffee & Containers.” C&C was conceived as a place for practitioners and IT leaders to learn and collaborate on all things microservices, cloud-native, containers, Kubernetes, etc. We were very proud to launch this series with Kelsey Hightower, Thought Leader and Developer Advocate at Google Cloud Platform, and Bruno Andrade, Founder and CEO of Shipa.io.

Regulatory compliance is time-consuming and expensive. A recent survey of IT security professionals found that, on average, organizations must comply with 13 different regulations and spend an average of $3.5M annually on compliance activities, with audit-related activities consuming 232 person hours per year. With a team of five people, that adds up to 1.5 months a year devoted to audit-related activity. That’s a lot of hours that could have been spent on initiatives driving customer value.

DevSecOps — or the merging of Ops and Security — has been at the center of discussion for the better part of the outgoing decade. Today, the complexity of infrastructure change, demands security and DevOps teams to work together more efficiently. But there are hurdles to adoption of DevSecOps as a methodology. Cloud-native applications often live in multiple clouds across data centers, co-location, and public clouds.

Making predictions is a tricky business at the best of times, but especially after a year that turned the world upside down. Even so, we have decided to talk to the IT leaders and discover what we should get ready for in 2021. With technology development, COVID-19 impact, and the new cybersecurity issues happening in the world, the IT engineers responsible for the IT infrastructure monitoring should be always ready to adapt to the new challenges.