How many servers can be managed by one system administrator? This question is pretty hard to answer since it depends decisively on the tasks that need to be operated. It is clear, however, that the amount of servers one engineer can manage has increased tremendously over the time, and is still growing. Public and private clouds, in combination with automation tools, enables us to automate many daily tasks. In a modern IT infrastructure almost everything can, and should, be automated.

We pride ourselves at OpsGenie for being the most reliable and flexible alert and incident management solution. However, what happens when you simply don’t want notifications? Even with escalations, routing rules, and on-call schedules, you may want extra configuration on when you are notified, and for what types of alerts.

Before the philosophy of DevOps, developers would build products, services, and infrastructures , but the responsibility for maintaining them would shift to operators, aka system or IT admins. The DevOps philosophy removes the boundary between Operations and Development teams, making system reliability a shared responsibility of all parties.

One of the most impressive books on DevOps, “The DevOps Handbook”, emphasis three fundamental principles underpinning DevOps: systems thinking, amplify feedback loops, and continual experimentation & learning. Amplifying feedback loops is described as creating the right to left feedback loops, which helps corrections to be made continually, by Gene Kim in his blog post. But, let’s start with why we should do this in the first place.