Our inaugural SolarWinds Day event was a smashing success! From the announcement of our SolarWinds® Observability solution—which was built fully in the cloud—to important updates to our on-premises SolarWinds® Hybrid Cloud Observability solution, this was our biggest day of product launches since the founding of SolarWinds. It was exciting to be a part of the event and to see so many people participate and engage in the discussion.

Modern software applications involve multiple layers of code and services, working together to meet increasingly demanding user requirements. To achieve this, systems became distributed, providing improved scalability, fault tolerance, and complexity. However, this innovation brought new challenges to basic troubleshooting and performance monitoring to maintain the health of systems. It’s for these reasons that observability is trending.

Containers have been the buzz among developers in recent years with the adoption of cloud-native orchestration tools like Kubernetes and DevOps workflows centered around containers. At the same time, virtual machines (VMs) still power many enterprise workloads, whether they’re running in a public cloud provider like Azure or an on-premises data center running VMware. In one of my early jobs, we built a private cloud—in 2012. This was a ground-breaking project at the time.

Over the last few years, containers have been one of the hottest topics when it comes to radically changing the way we develop, operate, and maintain our applications. And it’s no coincidence the rise of containers has occurred right alongside the rise of the cloud and the DevOps movement. This shift in development and operations has brought new challenges as container technologies have evolved.

The pandemic has brought a great number of changes with it for businesses, from remote work to increased cyber threats. The IT concerns we had pre-pandemic are simply not the same now, especially when it comes to cybersecurity. With October being Cybersecurity Awareness month, I wanted to reflect on these changes and what we as a community have learned over the past couple of years.

MySQL is the most used database in the world. And as it continues to grow in popularity as an open-source database system for developers, understanding how these indexes work is an important step for database developers and administrators. This tutorial is going to explore clustered indexes and secondary indexes in MySQL. MySQL also has other types of indexes besides the B-tree indexes I’ll be discussing, such as fulltext indexes and hash indexes.

Just before Halloween 2021, Roblox engineers experienced a horror story: a service outage that also took down critical monitoring systems. It seemed like the issue was a hardware problem, but it wasn’t. Users were frustrated, and the clock was ticking. After three full days of downtime, service was finally restored on Halloween day. While the incident itself was an IT nightmare, Roblox’s detailed technical post-mortem several months later was an excellent way to bounce back.

The ongoing partnership between Papertrail and DigitalOcean led to the development of the Papertrail software as a service (SaaS) add-on in the DigitalOcean Marketplace. With the add-on, developers can add powerful, simple, and scalable Papertrail log management to their DigitalOcean infrastructure in seconds. In two earlier posts, we reviewed how the add-on helps teams simplify and centralize log management.

Side by side with the popularity of hyperscale public cloud providers such as AWS and Microsoft Azure, many organizations maintain on-premises data centers. Organizations may keep them for mission-critical legacy systems with performance demands the cloud cannot meet, or simply be in transition and have not yet migrated their infrastructure to the cloud.

I find it amazing how much opportunity and flexibility cloud environments are creating for organizations of all sizes. I’m seeing more and more companies experimenting with open-source software (OSS) relational database systems, which years ago would’ve been too complicated for the customer to set up. With Azure, you can spin up OSS systems like MySQL or PostgreSQL quickly to determine if the engine fits their needs. If it does, you can continue development on it.