Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In a previous article, we covered how easy it is to create Spring Boot containers with Rockcraft. So the next logical step is to deploy and operate your application in a production environment. The Juju ecosystem is the key to making this process straightforward. In this article we walk through the steps required to deploy a Spring Boot application to production using Juju and Kubernetes.

As a baseline, engineering leaders need their teams to adopt AI tools to speed up velocity and ship faster. Most organizations have already rolled out AI coding assistants or are evaluating them, but there's a really big difference between buying a tool and successfully scaling it across an engineering organization. If you layer AI on top of a chaotic codebase or a disorganized service catalog, you accelerate the creation of legacy code.

Tier 1 ticket automation is one of the most tempting (and, to be brutally honest, most mishandled) initiatives in IT service management. On paper, it seems simple: automate the high-volume requests, reduce handle time, and give your service desk some breathing room. In practice, though, many teams end up with brittle scripts and automations that quietly drift outside ITSM guardrails.

Monitoring performance of Heroku applications helps improve user experience. This blog post covers Heroku monitoring add-ons and explores why Hosted Graphite is the best choice in 2026. We'll discuss the benefits and setup process of the Hosted Graphite add-on. We'll also discuss future trends in Heroku monitoring.

Integrating feature flag context into OpenTelemetry traces enhances observability by recording flag states as span attributes, making it easier to analyze how specific flags influence application behavior. When you toggle a feature flag, you're changing the behavior of your application; sometimes, in subtle ways that are hard to detect through logs or metrics alone. By adding feature flag attributes directly to spans, you can make these changes observable at the trace level.

Redis is a widely used in-memory data store, commonly deployed as a cache, session store, message broker, or fast key-value database. Because Redis often sits on the critical path of an application, having visibility into its behavior (memory usage, client connections, command throughput, cache efficiency) is essential for troubleshooting and performance tuning.

Everywhere around us, technology is evolving at lightning speed, yet the networks which underpin these capabilities often lag behind. This gap creates vulnerabilities that can impact everything from energy grids to emergency services. Forbes recently explored this urgent issue in an article featuring insights from our CEO Bruce McClelland, who shared an informed perspective on why modernization is essential, not optional. I encourage you to take a few minutes to read the full article.

OpenAI doesn’t bill per feature, per customer, or per transaction. It bills per token, across multiple models, with usage patterns that can change by the hour. As a result, two API calls that support the same feature can have very different costs. Without a clear way to translate token-level pricing into something product, engineering, and finance teams can reason about, AI spend becomes difficult to forecast and harder to control.

FinOps is evolving fast, and 2026 is shaping up to be a big year for specialization. While these certifications are ranked from beginner to advanced to help you build skills in the right order, one course stands out as the hottest recommendation right now: FinOps for AI. AI spend is accelerating, ownership is getting murky, and teams are scrambling to keep up. That urgency is exactly why FinOps for AI is generating so much interest heading into 2026.

There’s a particular flavor of skepticism that shows up whenever someone suggests using Let’s Encrypt. The security team crosses their arms. “Free certificates? For production? We’re a serious organization. We use Sectigo.” I get it. You’ve been buying certificates from the same vendors for twenty years. They send you invoices, you pay them, certificates appear. It feels responsible, and free feels like a trap. But is it?