Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In recent times, particularly during the pandemic, working remotely has become the new normal. Not only is it a need of the time, but employers have also started acknowledging the benefits of a remote workforce. Some of these include cost elimination of renting a workspace, access to a wider talent pool, and increased productivity. Furthermore, a better work-life balance also relates to higher employee satisfaction, loyalty and retention.

The Suez Canal has been big news over the last couple of weeks. We wondered how a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) might conduct a postmortem on what happened with the Ever Given, and what that might mean if a comparable incident occurred at a modern tech company.

The adoption of Infrastructure as Code(IaC) has skyrocketed in recent years as engineers seek ways to deploy cloud infrastructure faster and more efficiently. IaC refers to the technologies and processes that manage and provision infrastructure using machine-readable languages (code) as opposed to inefficient manual operations.

When you start researching how to improve the reliability of your software, you will soon run into terms like SLOs and SLAs. It can sound intimidating, but it's quite straightforward to understand. In this post, we will introduce these terms, the differences between them and how to start using them to make your systems more reliable.

Azure Service Health continuously notifies you of issues that may affect the availability of your environment, such as service incidents, planned maintenance periods, or regional outages. We’ve recently enhanced our Azure integration to include additional support for monitoring Service Health issues, enabling you to keep tabs on the health of your Azure environment and take proactive measures to mitigate downtime.

Today we’re proud to announce the general availability of Relay, a cloud-native workflow automation platform. We launched our public beta of Relay last June, and we’re now officially out of beta and open for business! We’ve been pretty busy during the beta period - early users have executed thousands of workflows, processed tons of events, and given us incredibly helpful feedback.

Distributed systems such as microservices have defined software engineering over the last decade. The majority of advancements have been in increasing resilience, flexibility, and rapidity of deployment at increasingly larger scales. For streaming giant Netflix, the migration to a complex cloud based microservices architecture would not have been possible without a revolutionary testing method known as fault injection. With tools like chaos monkey, Netflix employs a cutting edge testing toolkit.