Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Today marks an exciting milestone for BigPanda and for the future of IT Operations. We’re thrilled to announce that BigPanda has acquired Velocity, an AI SRE company whose technology and team share our passion for transforming how enterprises keep the digital world running. Velocity brings deep expertise in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and major incident response, developed alongside some of the world’s most sophisticated technology organizations.

The tech world loves buzzwords. We’ve lived through the Cloud Era, the Mobile Era, the AI Era (we’re still in that one, apparently). But 2025 marks something different. Something developers have been craving for years but couldn’t quite name. Welcome to The Builders Era. Not because of some shiny new framework or yet another platform promising to 10x your productivity. The Builders Era is happening because developers are done being spectators in their own craft.

Modern engineering teams face competing priorities. Developers are expected to deliver new features faster than ever, but users expect rock-solid reliability with every release. Shipping quickly can feel like you’re gambling with user trust. If you move too fast, you risk outages, but if you move too slowly, innovation stalls.

Ensuring digital services remain accessible, reliable, and secure is a high priority for any organization operating at scale. For the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), this focus is central to its mission of providing quality care to veterans, their families, and caregivers. Often described as “the largest IT shop in the United States,” the VA manages 2.7 million pieces of equipment across a vast network of interconnected systems.

Cloud object storage powers a wide range of workloads, from AI training datasets to customer-facing media libraries. As your data grows into the petabyte scale, managing storage costs and ensuring reliability requires fine-grained visibility. You need answers to questions like: Which specific teams, services, workloads, or datasets are driving spend? Which data is cold and should be archived? What fixes will have the biggest impact on cost and performance?

Once, when I was a very junior developer, I was discussing a bug with a very senior developer (let's call him Burt). Satisfied with the fix, I said something like "oh, that was a great bug". He looked at me as if his eyes were going to fall out of his head. Clearly, this enraged him. He briefly went off about how there are no great bugs, there are only bugs to squash – and that’s all.

Performance defines player experience. When a game lags, crashes, or delays inputs, players lose patience. In competitive and live-service titles, even a few hundred milliseconds can decide whether someone keeps playing or uninstalls for good. Modern games rely on complex ecosystems built on cloud servers, microservices, and real-time data synchronization. Millions of concurrent players generate massive workloads that test the limits of any infrastructure.

When you run services on Quarkus, you need a steady stream of signals to understand how the application behaves—CPU trends, request timings, memory patterns, and how each endpoint responds under load. Metrics give you that visibility. They help answer questions like: OpenTelemetry fits well here because it gives Quarkus a common way to generate and export metrics without locking you into a specific monitoring tool.

When teams manage a high volume of alerts, it’s easy for things to start blending together. A system outage, a temperature warning, a network slowdown – without a way to quickly identify what’s what, it takes longer to triage and prioritize. Especially on mobile, scrolling through a list of similar-looking alerts can slow your response and add confusion during incidents.

Singapore’s digital economy is growing at a remarkable pace, but with that growth comes a challenge: the nation is on track to need more than a million additional digitally skilled workers by 2026, particularly in cybersecurity, data, and AI. This is not just about filling jobs — it’s about ensuring the country’s long-term digital resilience.