Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

It is a super exciting day! Finally, you can invite your friends/team/colleagues (pick one) via the web console.

With companies expecting software products to handle constantly increasing volumes of requests and network bandwidth use, apps must be primed for scale. If you need resilient, resource-conserving systems with rapid delivery, it is time to design a distributed system. To successfully architect a heterogeneous, secure, fault-tolerant, and efficient distributed system, you need conscientiousness and some level of experience.

Memory (or RAM, short for random-access memory) is a critical computing resource that stores temporary data on a system. Memory is a finite resource, and the amount of memory available determines the number and complexity of processes that can run on the system. Running out of RAM can cause significant problems such as system-wide lockups, terminated processes, and increased disk activity. Understanding how and when these issues can happen is vital to creating stable and resilient systems.

As software applications grow in scale and complexity, the surface areas for security vulnerabilities and exploits grow with it. Modern development practices include large amounts of code reuse. First, in the form of language-specific standard libraries such as the C++ STL, the Golang standard library, and Microsoft.NET. Second, in the form of open-source libraries found on places like Github. Much of this code is built using other libraries, introducing a web of dependencies into modern software.

Few practices exemplify the impact of DevOps more than Infrastructure as Code (IaC). Anyone who remembers hearing “I don’t know why it’s not working; it worked on my machine …” can vouch for this! IaC provides a standard way to create declarative descriptions of infrastructure to represent desired environment states — essentially allowing teams to manage IT infrastructure using configuration files.