Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Testing a FastAPI app that calls OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini gets expensive fast. The problem is not just the API bill in production. It is all the repeated traffic in development: prompt tweaks, CI runs, regression checks, and the load tests you keep putting off because every run burns tokens. Hand-written mocks do not help much once the app is doing multi-step LLM work.

At SREday NYC 2026, the ShipTalk podcast welcomed Birol Yildiz, Co-founder and CEO of ilert, for a conversation about the next evolution of incident response. In the episode, ShipTalk host Dewan Ahmed, Principal Developer Advocate at Harness, spoke with Birol about how artificial intelligence is transforming reliability engineering—from simply assisting engineers during incidents to autonomously diagnosing and resolving outages.

Most engineering teams know the difference between “we have tests” and “we know we’re well-tested.” Your CI builds may be green, but without code coverage, it’s hard to prove how much of your code is actually exercised by automated tests. Code coverage measures what percentage of your code runs during tests (lines, branches, and functions), and when you wire it into CI gates, it becomes an enforceable quality signal and not a vanity metric.

Internal platform adoption usually doesn’t fail because developers “hate standards.” It fails because the platform doesn’t make their day easier. If your portal still means waiting, waiting on an environment, waiting on an approval, waiting on the platform team, it becomes one more tab that people stop opening. But if the platform lets engineers get the common stuff done quickly (with guardrails that keep things consistent), they’ll come back on their own.

Tech headlines are being dominated by the perfect storm that has led to a global shortage of Random Access Memory (RAM). As the short-term, temporary memory that handles data for processing and applications, RAM – and specifically Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) – is a foundational business technology. The primary driver of this shortage is an industry-wide shift to High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM). This is the specialised memory required for artificial intelligence (AI).

For longer than I’m proud of, I was an AI skeptic. Then, over the holidays, I vibe coded an app whose sole purpose was to make me a better person. The app is a motivator. It’s programmed to send me timely reminders along certain themes, like reading every day, making healthy eating choices, and giving myself plenty of time to plan for anniversaries and birthdays.

On March 18, Jensen Huang took the stage at NVIDIA’s GTC conference in San Jose for a keynote that ran well over two hours — covering everything from CUDA’s 20-year history to humanoid robots that may one day wander Disneyland. But buried inside the spectacle was a remarkably clear-eyed articulation of the economic forces now bearing down on every enterprise that builds on cloud infrastructure.

Certbot is good software in the classic Linux tradition: it does one thing simply and expects you to chain it together with everything else. One server, one certificate, done. The trouble is that most environments are not simple. And the moment yours isn’t, you discover that renewing a certificate and getting it deployed are two different problems, and deployment is your problem.

Operators today are navigating unprecedented complexity—rising costs, accelerating customer expectations, and increasingly dynamic networks. In this recent video interview, my colleague Kevin Wade and I explore why AI‑driven automation has shifted from a “nice‑to‑have” technology to a core business requirement for telecom operators and beyond.

In September 2025, dozens of popular JavaScript packages, like chalk and debug, were compromised on the npm registry. These packages are so ubiquitous they end up in everything: front-end apps, back-end microservices, and CI tooling. Developers didn’t do anything wrong, they just ran the same command they always do: npm install chalk. But then the malware arrived silently. This wasn’t a bug in an operating system. It wasn’t a virus on someone’s laptop.