Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Due to a great synergy between our products, I am happy to announce that Cloudflare and appfleet are joining forces! The appfleet platform is shutting down, with all clusters going offline on October 31st 2021.

In the daily life of a Site Reliability Engineer, the main goal is to reduce all the work we call toil. But what is toil? Toil is the kind of work tied to running a production service that tends to be manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical, devoid of enduring value, and scales linearly as a service grows. This blog post describes our journey to automate our nodes rotation process when we have a new AMI release and the open source tools we built on this.

Virtualization and cloud have forced the need for automation. In the “old” days, it would take weeks for a new physical server to arrive. There was little pressure to install and configure the operating system on it rapidly. We would insert a disc into the drive and then follow our checklist. A few days later, it would be ready to use. But the ability to spin up new virtual machines (VMs) in minutes required us to get better at automating this process.

Docker containers have taken the software industry by storm. Ever since its launch in 2013, Docker’s usage and popularity have grown at a rapid pace. Docker has saved organizations from the challenges of managing dependency and version conflicts across multiple environments by providing a portable, secure, and (most importantly) reliable container technology for shipping applications.

Minimizing and automating the path from development and production is necessary in order to stay competitive and keep customers happy. As engineering teams strive to solve this by quickly and efficiently rolling out new features, updates, and bug fixes, continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) has come to be regarded as an industry best practice. One of the most popular CI/CD solutions is Jenkins, an open-source job execution system.