Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

SRE and DevOps are closely related concepts, and many businesses can benefit from embracing both of them. Nonetheless, there are important distinctions between SRE and DevOps.

Data center managers are tasked with increasing energy efficiency to improve data center sustainability and save money. One of the best practices to increase data center energy efficiency is to implement data center containment. Data center containment is a highly effective way of managing airflow, increasing efficiency, and reducing wasteful energy costs. It is the separation of cold supply air from cooling equipment from the hot exhaust air from IT equipment.

After you have stopped an incident from affecting your customers, you need a more thorough investigation in order to prevent similar incidents in the future. Postmortems record the root causes of an incident and provide insights for making your systems more resilient. At the same time, postmortems can be difficult to produce, since they require deeper analysis and coordination between teammates who are busy with the next development cycle.

Package repositories were never something I thought about as a developer unless something didn’t work. For example, if it was slow, wouldn’t connect, wouldn’t install, or was overly complicated to configure. Mostly I wanted something I barely noticed. Something simple and easy to use.

Terraform is probably the most used tool to deploy cloud services. It's a fantastic tool, easily usable, with descriptive language (DSL) called HCL, team-oriented, supporting tons of cloud providers, etc. On paper, it's an attractive solution. And it's easy to start delegating more and more responsibilities to Terraform, as it's like a swiss knife; it knows how to perform several kinds of actions against several varieties of technologies.

The first time I was tasked with maintaining a production server, I relied on a checklist my predecessor had left for me. The checklist contained all the maintenance steps along with their corresponding commands. In those early days, I religiously copied each command, double- and triple-checking each character before pressing the Enter key. Slowly but surely, the commands got committed to memory until one day I realized I did not need the checklist.