Debunking Myths About Reliability
“Our service should always be up.” Some myths just won’t die. Engineering for reliability is well understood by engineering leaders, less so by bosses demanding unreasonable uptime with minimal resources and immense feature pressure. Business leaders tend to waffle between ignoring reliability with a hand wave and freaking out after an outage. How can they […]
Why Observability is Important for Development Teams
Observability, which allows development teams to understand better how their systems behave in production, is critical to successful software delivery. According to Gartner, by 2026, 70% of organizations that successfully applied this practice will achieve shorter latency for decision-making, enabling competitive advantage for target business or IT processes. Observability allows development teams to identify and […]
Nobl9 Adds Service Level Analyzer to SLO Management Platform
Nobl9 today added a free tool for analyzing service level objectives (SLOs) to its platform to enable DevOps team to more accurately set reliability goals. Brian Singer, chief product officer for Nobl9, said Service Level Analyzer collects metrics and observability data from more than 24 DevOps tools and platforms that can then be used to […]
5 Technologies Powering Cloud Optimization
Cloud optimization is the process of improving the performance, cost-effectiveness, and reliability of cloud computing resources and services. It involves identifying and addressing inefficiencies in cloud architecture, application design and resource utilization, as well as implementing best practices for security, scalability and disaster recovery. The goal of cloud optimization is to maximize the benefits of […]
Where Does Observability Stand Today, and Where is it Going Next?
As we move into the second half of 2023, it’s only natural to engage in the annual ‘state of the industry’ reviews and take a general inventory of the past year while looking out into the immediate future. Observability has gained traction among DevOps and platform engineering teams over the past year and is poised […]
Five Great DevOps Job Opportunities
DevOps.com is now providing a weekly DevOps jobs report through which opportunities for DevOps professionals will be highlighted as part of an effort to better serve our audience. Our goal in these challenging economic times is to make it easier for DevOps professionals to advance their careers. Of course, the pool of available DevOps talent […]
How To Build Anti-Fragile Software Ecosystems
Just as organisms are susceptible to diseases and viruses, software systems are susceptible to hacks and errors. And within many complex interconnected systems, a minor bug could have a cascading effect across an entire organism, causing it to break. As such, increasing the resiliency of a software ecosystem is something engineers continually strive for. But […]
Why SREs Are Critical to DevOps
Although a relatively new concept, site reliability engineers (SREs) have become crucial for DevOps teams, helping to solve an array of operational problems such as network availability and user experience. However, in previous years, some people have questioned the longevity of such a role. This article will discuss several reasons why site reliability engineering roles […]
Best of 2022: Day in the Life of a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
As we close out 2022, we at DevOps.com wanted to highlight the most popular articles of the year. Following is the latest in our series of the Best of 2022. By now, most of us are familiar with the concept of site reliability engineering (SRE). The term was originally coined by Google and SRE has […]
Best of 2022: SRE Vs. Platform Engineering: What’s the Difference?
As we close out 2022, we at DevOps.com wanted to highlight the most popular articles of the year. Following is the latest in our series of the Best of 2022. Site reliability engineering (SRE) teams and platform engineering teams share similar goals—like maximizing automation and reducing toil—and similar methodologies. But they have different priorities, and […]
Blue-Green Deployment: What Are the Options?
Blue-green deployment is a change management strategy for software releases. Blue-green deployments require two identically configured hardware environments. One environment is active and serves end users while the other remains idle. Blue-green deployments are typically used for applications with strict uptime requirements. First, new code is released to staging environments and fully tested. Once the […]
Switching From FluentD to Vector Log Aggregation Tool
Log files are extremely important to the data analysis process as they contain essential information about usage patterns, activities and operations within an operating system, application, server or device. This data is relevant to a number of use cases across an organization from resource management, application troubleshooting, regulation compliance and SIEM and business analytics and […]
SRE Survey Reveals Major Technical and Cultural Challenges
Catchpoint, in partnership with Blameless, today published an annual survey of 559 site reliability engineers (SREs) that found 59% of respondents didn’t view tool sprawl to be a major concern. Another 40% said tool sprawl is a moderate (33%) to serious problem (8%). More than half of respondents said they build as much as 30% […]
Of Max and Min: The Non-Interference Prime Directive (for Visibility)
Last issue, I cited CPU utilization as an example of a metric that is often misused to describe/explain/infer system performance and asserted that improved visibility can help to overcome such misuse. In this issue, I will expand on what improved visibility means and present two case studies that illustrate a recent antipattern that I’ve noticed […]
Of Max and Min: When Performance Engineering Plans Go Awry
Modern software developers have access to powerful tools and services which allow them to quickly develop, demo and deploy fully functional applications. But what happens when the single-user prototype satisfies all required functionality but the user says the system seems slow? Or if the initial implementation turns out fine for one user, but multiple users […]
Scaling Predictive Analytics With AIOps to Drive Next-Gen SRE
Enterprise systems are only as valuable as they are reliable, in the sense that they don’t suffer excessive breakdowns. Otherwise, companies experience costly downtime and added stress for engineers due to the additional burden of managing issues. This critical function of ensuring systems run reliably and optimally, at production scale and with minimum human intervention, […]
Kintaba Creates the First Conference Dedicated to Incident Response – Techstrong TV
John Egan, Co-founder and CEO at Kintaba, talks about IRConf, the first conference fully dedicated to Incident Response. The company behind the conference is Kintaba — a modern incident management platform for the entire organization. The video is below followed by a transcript of the conversation. Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone. Welcome to Techstrong TV. We […]
The Curious Connection Between Cloud Repatriation and SRE Ops
I have a fondness for philosophy. I’m about three classes short of a degree, and every few years I tell myself one day I’ll finish it. Thus, I am very familiar with what is known in statistics—and logic—as a post hoc fallacy, from which we get the saying “correlation is not causation.” This is the […]
Study: Real-Time Data Has A Transformative Effect
We all know that data is the heart of the modern digital business. And real-time data is arguably the next evolution—having up-to-date data can empower energy savings and optimizations to reduce cost. Real-time data processing also aids fraud detection and improves health care responsiveness. Especially in DevOps, access to real-time data is necessary to reduce […]
NewOps? AIOps? NoOps? Just Don’t Call Me Late for Dinner
Once again, we are seeing an uptick in the use of the term NoOps. I always felt that NoOps was a misleading and, in fact, empty phrase. I don’t care what magic you think you have; you are never going to eliminate the need to operate your software, applications and infrastructure. I first heard the […]
Everything is DevOps
It’s funny how we in IT tend to be absolutists, shoving everything into the current bucket. XML was going to eliminate programming—even though it wasn’t even particularly good at data representation. NoCode was going to eliminate programming (yeah, that’s a theme, I’ll skip the other 50 or so ‘going to end programming’ cycles we’ve been […]
The Rogers Outage of 2022: Takeaways for SREs
When, eight years from now, folks are creating lists of the top IT incidents of the 2020s, there’s a good chance that they’ll include the Rogers outage of 2022. The failure, which made internet and cellular network service unavailable for more than 12 million users across Canada, was one of the most significant outages in […]
5 Ways to Prevent an Outage
In today’s always-on, ever-connected world, we all expect 100% availability. What gets in the way of this? The devil is in the details. Over time, everything breaks: Disks, nodes, containers, networks, DNS servers and configuration issues can all lead to major outages. Amazon’s 13 minutes of downtime in August 2021 translated to almost $5 million […]