Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

All it takes to make critical applications to fail, customer portals to crash, and render internal systems inaccessible is just one expired client secret. Not a sophisticated cyberattack. Not a worldwide cloud service outage. Just a single credential that quietly expired while everyone focused on "more important" things. Is secret expiry that big of a concern? Chances are great that enterprise-scale organizations have at least one expired credential in production right now.

In software development, load testing plays a critical role in ensuring that applications perform optimally under any imaginable load condition. To do this, developers subject applications to several types of load tests, including scalability, spike, endurance, and stress testing. The ultimate goal of these performance tests is to pinpoint potential bottlenecks and ensure the reliability of the overall system where the software application runs before reaching production.

The modern world runs on mission-critical software. It moves our money, drives our cars, diagnoses our illnesses, and fundamentally improves our lives. But, organizations building this critical software face a paradox: they need to move fast to stay competitive, but they also need rigorous governance to manage risk. This has created a lot of tension in regulated industries.

During the October 20th AWS outage, not one Control Plane customer went down. Here’s the architecture that made that possible, and how to assess your own.