Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Agility matters in incident response, and the easiest way to spring into action is by having a well-defined team in place ahead of time. The right people in the right roles will help you respond to and resolve incidents more quickly and efficiently. In fact, we found in the Incident Benchmark Report that incidents with roles assigned had a 42% lower mean time to resolution than those that didn’t. But what roles do you need to fill?

Over two years after releasing The Forrester Wave™: Infrastructure Automation Platforms, Q3 2020, Forrester recently released The Forrester Wave™: Infrastructure Automation, Q1 2023 report. If you are unfamiliar with the most recent report, it examines eleven top vendors within this space, and their capabilities to help guide purchasing decisions based on need.

Just the other day I was working on a side project. As we sometimes tend to do, I began on the production branch thinking to myself, “I’ll move this to the feature branch before I push”. Of course, as we tend to do, I forgot that I was working from the production branch and git push’ed—triggering a production deployment. I’d have loved to be able to abort that deployment at that moment.

As I’ve discussed in my previous blogs in this series, smart networks are becoming increasingly important in an ever-increasing range of industries. These smart networks can deliver significant benefits, but there are some risks, challenges and issues associated with moving to “smart”. In my final blog in the series I will discuss what is required from a modernized communications network to counter some of these risk, challenges and issues.

Code reviews are a massively beneficial way to improve code quality, identify vulnerabilities, and establish coding best practices. According to Microsoft researchers, peer code reviews improve code quality by 15–35%. In addition, according to the Journal of Systems and Software, peer code reviews increase accountability by 30–40%.

Logistics does not only involve getting company resources from point A to point B. When a company has a logistics arm, they also need to develop the practice of field service management. This applies to any kind of customer-facing logistics, whether they are service vehicles for on-site support or company cars for client visits. Unfortunately, some organizations are immature when it comes to their field service management, employing only the most bare-bones approach to the discipline.

When containers and container orchestration were introduced, they opened the possibility of helping companies utilize physical resources like CPU and memory more efficiently. But as more companies and bigger enterprises have adopted Kubernetes, FinOps professionals may wonder why their cloud bills haven’t gone down—or worse, why they have increased.

Shouldn’t your alerts be doing more of the work for you? A noisy channel with every alert from hundreds of monitors and microservices is a chaotic place to actually find the incidents that are impacting your customers. And it still requires a heck of a lot of human intervention. We think it’s time for something better. Today we’re releasing Alert Routing: the next phase of worry-free automation from FireHydrant.

I am excited to announce the partnership between Qovery and Doppler. Qovery is an infrastructure automation platform that helps developers deploy their applications more easily, while Doppler is a fully managed SecretOps platform that enables engineering teams to better manage their environment variables and secrets.

Canonical is committed to enabling Ubuntu users to leverage the strong run-time confidentiality and integrity guarantees that confidential computing provides. That is why we are happy to announce we have joined the confidential computing consortium, a project community at the Linux Foundation that is focused on accelerating the adoption of confidential computing and driving cross-industry collaboration around relevant open source software, standards and tools.