Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Going on-call for the first time can feel a bit overwhelming, but a little prep work makes it smooth and stress-free. This guide covers five things to set up before you start your first on-call shift. They help you stay on top of your schedule, get on-call notifications, and have a backup in place. By the end, you’ll be ready to handle your first on-call shift with confidence.

Senior engineers are quitting because infrastructure plumbing has replaced actual building. This analysis explains why cloud abstraction is the ultimate retention lever for 2026.

Deployments fail for dozens of reasons. Most of them are obvious from the error messages or pod events. But when a deployment rolls out successfully according to Kubernetes but your application starts experiencing latency spikes and error rate increases, the investigation becomes significantly harder. This scenario walks through a configuration drift incident where the deployment appeared healthy but available replicas were constantly flapping, creating cascading reliability issues.

When discussing the process of testing an API, one of the most common sets of terms you might encounter are “mocks” and “stubs.” These terms are quite ubiquitous, but understanding exactly how they differ from one another - and when each is the correct method for software testing - is critical to building an appropriate test and validation framework. In this blog, we’re going to talk about the differences and similarities between mocks and stubs.

VictoriaMetrics is a fast, cost-efficient, and highly scalable time-series database designed as a drop-in replacement for Prometheus storage. It is widely used for collecting, storing, and querying metrics at scale, while remaining lightweight enough to run as a single binary or container. Because it is fully Prometheus-compatible, VictoriaMetrics supports standard PromQL queries and integrates seamlessly with Grafana.

Infrastructure code rarely stays clean on its own. Teams move fast, and reviews aren’t always deep or consistent. Over time, misconfigurations build up and increase the risk of outages, security gaps, or unpredictable behavior. Static scanning tools can help, but they often require setup, expertise, and don’t always reflect how infrastructure code is actually used across environments. Code Optimizer, now in beta, helps teams catch those issues earlier.

Harness has been recognized by TechStrong Group for its comprehensive, AI-native platform vision, winning Best End-to-End DevOps Platform, Best Platform Engineering Solution, and DevOps Industry Leader of the Year. At Harness, our mission has always been simple but ambitious: to enable every software engineering team in the world to deliver code reliably, efficiently, and quickly to their users, just like the world’s leading tech companies.

Static delivery pipelines are becoming a bottleneck. The best CI/CD tools for Kubernetes are those that move beyond simple code builds to provide total environment orchestration and developer self-service.