Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

If you are a software engineer like myself, two areas that I am not well versed in are networking and storage. Yes, my application has to communicate and yes my application needs to be deployed and requires some storage. Though that is usually the extent of my knowledge. Thanks to using elastic compute from cloud vendors in the last several years, the answer I usually give is “yes, attach 100gb of standard block storage per instance”.

The cybersecurity talent shortage is real. As of December 2021, a job-tracking database from the U.S. Commerce Department showed nearly 600,000 unfilled cybersecurity positions. And a 2021 study found that 57% of cybersecurity professionals worked at organizations that have been directly impacted by the cybersecurity talent shortage. Even so, many organizations want to “shift security left” or build security best practices earlier into the software development lifecycle (SDLC).

Bare metal Kubernetes is a powerful set of technologies that builds on the best ideas behind the public and private cloud, yet abstracts away some toilsome aspects related to virtualisation management and networking. For operators and users, it provides significant benefits, making it easier and faster to ship and maintain complex, distributed applications.

Forrester Research interviewed digital leaders at enterprise organizations and found that, on average, they were maintaining 268 customer-facing websites and applications. As the number of websites you manage continues to grow, so do the number of challenges in managing it. Often the websites are designed by different teams, are built using different languages and frameworks, and run on different hosting solutions with different DevOps tools and workflows.

It's the middle of the night when your phone goes off. You rub your eyes and unlock the screen to see a SEV 1 alert from your incident management tool. The application is down, multiple cloud server instances are offline, and the remaining instances are being overwhelmed by the sudden increase in demand. You jump out of bed and start trying to troubleshoot. You log into your cloud provider and try to provision systems manually, only to find out you can't.

An analysis of SRE job descriptions from 4 companies highlights what businesses actually expect SREs to do.