Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The weather may be frightful in most parts of the U.S. right now, but these cloud cost updates are pretty delightful (if we do say so ourselves). Here’s the top cloud news that dropped in January 2025: Enjoy!

A reliable notifications system can send highly scalable, multi-protocol messages — via email, SMS, or apps — all from one platform. For example, you can send timely cost anomaly alerts directly to your developers on Slack to alert them to potential overspending before it becomes a board meeting emergency. So, what does this have to do with Amazon SNS pricing? Let’s start at the beginning to better understand what you’re paying for when you get that AWS SNS bill.

2024 was the GenAI year. With new and more performant LLMs and a higher number of projects rolled out to production, adoption of GenAI doubled compared to the previous year (source: Gartner). In the same report, organizations answered that they are using AI in more than one part of their business, with 65% of respondents mentioning they use GenAI in one function.

Server monitoring is crucial to learn these days to use your servers efficiently. It helps optimize the performance of a server and diagnose issues productively. One useful tool used these days is Graphite, which helps monitor a server’s performance and provides graphing solutions by gaining valuable insights into your server. You can explore MetricFire’s Hosted Graphite service today by signing up for a free trial or booking a demo session.

Critical infrastructure — including systems vital to energy, water, transportation, communication, healthcare, finance, the military, and more — is the backbone of any nation’s public health, safety, security, and economic stability. As a result of their necessity, these systems are prime targets for sophisticated state-sponsored threat actors, organized cybercrime groups, and even hacktivists interested in drawing the most attention to their cause.

Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) is a software development methodology in which applications are built to match the behaviors a user would expect from the software. An evolution of Test-Driven Development (TDD), BDD gathers user stories about how users expect applications to behave, then creates software tests to validate that their applications match this behavior. The BDD methodology utilizes specific language and naming conventions.

In 2022, we wrote about our engineering interview process to make it more transparent and accessible to candidates. A lot has changed since then: we've grown to 80 people across London, San Francisco, and New York, and naturally, our interview process has evolved too. We thought it was time for an update!