Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The cloud bill arrives at the end of every month, and somewhere in it sits a line item that nobody outside the infrastructure team really understands. It might be called "data transfer," "egress," or "outbound bandwidth," and it might be 5% of the total or even 25%. Whatever it is, it tends to be the line that finance asks engineering about, and engineering struggles to explain in a way that finance can act on. The problem is that egress is a fee that hides in plain sight. It's not on the marketing page.

The default cloud choice for technically literate teams has shifted. It hasn't shifted dramatically; the major hyperscalers aren't going anywhere, and their enterprise position is still strong, but the conversation that used to start with "which hyperscaler" now genuinely starts with "what do we actually need." That's new.

Trigger warning: this one is about Java, authentication, and Docker Compose files. If that is not your thing, I am sorry, but they are part of life and they are honestly not that hard to work with. Everything here is open source on our GitHub repo, so you can follow along. Recording an authenticated Java flow, replaying it, hitting the dreaded 403, and fixing it with a proxymock recommendation.

We’ve gotten used to understanding our applications through signals, summaries, and traces. Tiny little bits of information about how the app really works. Not because that’s the best way to do it, but because it’s been too hard to get the real thing. The real information exists. It’s on the network. How people called your app and what your code did. What other systems it called, the database queries it made, and the result sets that came back.

We are pleased to announce the release of Excel Add-ins 3.0, a major update to our Excel Add-ins for databases and cloud applications. The new version adds support for Microsoft Excel 2024 across all products. It also includes new database versions, expanded object and report support, improved data type handling, and enhanced connection security.

A multi-hypervisor environment is an infrastructure in which multiple virtualization technologies coexist. Common drivers include mergers and acquisitions, hybrid cloud strategies, workload-specific optimization, and the avoidance of vendor lock-in.