Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Using containers for microservices has gained a lot of popularity in the last decade or so. Developing the application through microservices across multiple containers results in the best of both worlds. It provides resilience as well as agility through scaling and improvements. Before we dwell on how containers and microservices form an ideal combination, let’s start with a basic understanding of microservices and containers.

Real User Monitoring (RUM) gives you visibility into the behavior of your users and the performance of your applications. You may already be using RUM monitors to automatically notify your team when the number of RUM events—such as pageviews, clicks, or errors—rises above a threshold you define.

Gone are days of large applications having tens of servers to deal with gigabytes of data, when seconds of response time and hours of offline maintenance were acceptable. Modern applications are deployed on everything running thousands of multi-core processors; end-users expect millisecond response times and 100% uptime. Need not mention the applications work with Data in Petabytes.

Whether you’ve heard of or fully jumped on the DevOps or SRE bandwagon, you may have also wondered how the two relate. What’s the difference? Are they really just different ways of looking at the same problem? The term DevOps hit the market first, but SRE wasn’t too far behind. And though they have different origin stories, they both focus on autonomy, automation, and iteration. So why do these paradigms exist? And why do we need both? Let’s look at this further.

Data center automation is expected to rapidly change the data center industry. Look at any data center industry publication, website, or event and there will be plenty of content predicting what data center automation is going to look like. Data center professionals are curious on how automation is going to change their jobs and data center management. The truth is that we already know.

While Financial Operations (FinOps) isn’t a new concept, it is becoming more prevalent in companies that have started seeing increases in their cloud spend. Historically, when engineers needed to set up infrastructure to complete a project, they had to go through a long process of procuring servers, finding space in a data center, and getting financial approval. This process could take two months or more, so it allowed plenty of time for oversight by the financial department.