Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

We see an increase in the number of companies building internal platform engineering teams. With this increase, we have seen some successful and some not-so-successful approaches. The goal of this article is to go through some of the practices we see out there.

Productivity is defined by measuring the amount of output over a given time frame. However, this discounts the quality of output, which is crucial in moving toward a more complete definition of productivity. Relating to services, increases in productivity generally highlight the amount of feature releases over time. This leaves out the critical measurement of quality compared to quantity. This is where a Service Catalog can greatly enhance true productivity within an engineering organization.

Achieving comprehensive security for the products delivered and deployed by organizations is becoming more difficult, due to a variety of factors. A key one is the growing volume, variety and complexity of software and connected devices in use. Another is the overwhelming risk of inherited software supply chain exposures. The result: Companies struggle every day to provide software with optimal security and protection against malicious activities, takeovers, data theft, and commercial sabotage.

If you're an engineer reading this, you might be wondering what I mean by the title. You might be a Site Reliability Engineer whose primary responsibility is to maintain the reliability of your company’s product/solution. You might be a software builder, a programmer responsible for building new capabilities and shipping them to production. All of these are important for any business to remain competitive.

In this highly dynamic environment, organizations are looking for ways to innovate and manage resources efficiently. In the first part of the two-part blog series, we saw how organizations handled incidents without an AIOps solution and how long it took to resolve that incident — a scenario representing different steps to resolve an incident. In the second part of the two-part blog series, we look at how organizations were able to handle incidents after deploying AIOps.

If you’re writing or tracking code for a project you’ve likely heard of Version Control Systems, or VCS, also commonly referred to as source control. The primary function of a Version Control System is to host a project and track how it develops over time. With a VCS, developers can compare changes in files, track commits, propose changes, view project history, revert to old versions of the project, and more.

Testing is one of those activities that if not exhaustive will not have its complete impact on your software development process. Oftentimes developers are only concerned about testing the application layer of the system (a.k.a the codebase) and ignore testing the data layer (the database) which is also as important as testing the code itself.

Today is CircleCI’s 10-year anniversary. I sent the whole staff an email that captures the sentiment of this important moment and I wanted to share it with you here. It offers a glimpse into what we’ve accomplished as an organization in the last decade and how much more we’ll accomplish in the decades to come.