Monitoring

  The industry as a whole uses Kubernetes as its default tool for container management. The diverse features and convenience it provides, combined with the ability to easily scale and adapt to a range of diverse needs make it an extremely handy tool. Microservices-based products appreciate it in particular, utilizing it to provide additional value to users in a short amount of time. Kubernetes empowers DevOps teams to focus solely on the development of new-age applications...

Observability in one form or another has always been a tenet of any best DevOps practice but for the most part the best that could until recently be achieved was continuous monitoring of a set of pre-defined metrics. Now with the arrival of a wide range of observability platforms it’s becoming much more feasible to not only monitor metrics but also proactive analyze IT environments in a way that proactively surfaces issues long before an...

This is the fourth part of a series of articles attempting to lay down a road map to kickstart a potential journey into SRE. In the first part of this series, we discussed MADARR and its relationships with the DevOps principles of continual development and continual improvement. The Second Article introduced the concepts of Observability and discussed the first stage in the journey outlined in the diagram below. The third article discussed moving your...

implementing SRE is hard, in this article we look at some of the things that need to be considered when considering a proof of Concept or Value.

In our first post in this series, we discussed SRE and why it is an integral paradigm concerning modern-day operational functionality.  If you remember the principle of MADARR that we introduced in the first article, you will recognise that it is predicated on Observability. Without the correct and expansive information, an engineer tasked with making informed decisions will be hobbled in their decision-making.  Now it goes without saying that the budgets available to AWS,...

There's been a lovely amount of blog posts, articles, tutorials, eBooks, and Youtube videos about all kinds of IT-related topics. These sources help you If you're stuck with a programming-related issue. Or when you face trouble setting up your (cloud) infrastructure resources. Websites such as Stackoverflow provide valuable discussions between tech experts. It all helps to sharpen your professional skills. Sometimes these valuable sources also contain beautiful schemas which are worthwhile to print and...

Several buzzwords floating around in conversational circles have pushed themselves to the forefront to such an extent that they have gained some traction with the Recruiters. One that seems to have particularly piqued the Recruiter's interest is SRE, to the point that I now receive three or four calls a week from them about the subject and potential roles.  Should I care?  And if I do care, how do I become a Site Reliability...

The most valuable software and applications in the modern world aren’t just those that offer speed, automation, and efficiency. Instead, the most successful and beneficial are the ones that provide visibility, and security across applications. As modern software infrastructure becomes more complex and with changing business requirements, observability that offers some degree of control is precious. Distributed tracing helps companies to tackle the challenges of observability by tracking requests as they move from frontend...

Modern applications are increasingly distributed in nature - that is, they follow the microservices model where a single application is decomposed into numerous independent, and interdependent services. This is great for reducing technical debt, and advancing innovation. However, with the complexity of distributed applications, diagnosing errors and performance issues that impact customer experience becomes a challenge. Observability, and in particular distributed tracing, helps companies cut through software complexity by enabling teams to solve problems...

There are still people in organizations that need to understand what a container is. And what the main benefits of container technology are. Although the concept is pretty old and the most famous container software (Docker) saw the light nearly a decade ago, this still holds true. Sometimes technical guys use the phrase "lightweight VM" to describe what the main characteristics of a container are. Especially when compared to a Virtual Machine. Technically speaking...