Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Not too long ago, engineering organizations were in a headlong rush to “innovate or die” by hiring more developers and shipping more code at breakneck speed. This expansion brought short-term velocity gains—but also created a tangle of orphaned services, inconsistent processes, and developers spending more time firefighting than innovating. Today, the reality is that you can’t just keep throwing headcount at complexity.

Cloud infrastructure powers everything from streaming services to enterprise databases, yet many organizations still run critical workloads on legacy systems. With the cloud migration market projected to reach $806.41 billion by 2029, growing at a CAGR of 28.24%, organizations of all sizes are racing to modernize their infrastructure and applications. This shift means companies need to stay competitive in a landscape where agility and scalability are non-negotiable.

Xero is a global technology company offering cloud-based accounting solutions designed specifically for small businesses. With engineering teams spread across Auckland, Wellington, Melbourne, and Toronto, managing clear ownership, consistency, and effective collaboration presented significant operational challenges.

Whether you’re migrating from on-premises to the cloud, between cloud providers, or to more advanced cloud architectures, each path shares common security challenges that must be addressed head-on. With the right approach, you can actually enhance your security posture during migration. In this article, we'll dig into practical approaches to cloud migration security, covering everything from initial planning to post-migration maintenance.

Security and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams often operate as separate entities within organizations despite sharing similar goals: keeping systems secure, reliable, and performant. Security teams focus on protecting systems from threats and ensuring compliance with regulatory frameworks. SRE teams concentrate on system reliability, performance optimization, and incident management.

This redesign is our biggest UI overhaul ever, and we’ve crafted it with three guiding pillars in mind: Below, you’ll find an overview of what’s new—and how you can take a look for yourself.

Cloud migration involves transferring digital assets, services, databases, applications, and IT resources from on-premises infrastructure to cloud environments. A well-executed cloud migration can reduce operational costs, improve scalability, enhance flexibility, and boost performance. Organizations can shift from capital-intensive infrastructure to more predictable pay-as-you-go expenses while scaling resources to match needs.

When considering or advocating for an Internal Developer Portal (IDP) within your organization, assessing potential impact is an exciting, but sometimes challenging endeavor, especially considering the broad set of use cases IDPs support and the lack of context and visibility before the presence of an IDP. Maybe you understand the inherent value of an IDP, but need to quantify the estimated savings/impact to justify the spend.

Engineering’s gotten really complicated. The rush to “innovate or die” created more code, more tools, and more teams—without a single, unifying way to keep it all healthy and moving. The result? Orphaned services, slow releases, and endless overhead... just to name a few.

The terms engineering excellence and developer experience are often used in ways that make them seem interchangeable. While these concepts do overlap, it’s important to understand that developer experience (DX) is just one subset of engineering excellence, not a one-to-one match. Below, we define engineering excellence, clarify what developer experience entails, and explore how improving developer experience supports—but does not replace—the broader objectives of engineering excellence.