Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

It can be quite challenging for an SRE team to maintain the well-being of a large-scale Kubernetes based system with hundreds or thousands of services. In this blog post, Gigi Sayfan, author of “Mastering Kubernetes”, outlines the SRE challenge and how we can achieve the ultimate goal of automated SRE with Kubernetes operators.

The ongoing pandemic and resulting economic downturn have led to dramatically changing market conditions. As a consequence, technology teams have become increasingly concerned with the need to minimize their financial risk and reduce costs to mitigate the effects of abruptly pivoting to a fully remote working environment. For some, there has been a struggle to maintain business continuity—i.e., keeping the physical components of the business running when everyone is working from home.

Efficient team communication requires the proper set of tools and processes, ensuring that the right persons receive timely messages. This way, recipients are well-informed of a critical issue, while having time to address the incident. Unfortunately, a large helicopter services company relied on time-wasting procedures to communicate with stakeholders, resulting in delayed incident response and resolution.

With many companies utilizing remote-working during the COVID-19 pandemic, effective communication is more important than ever. Unfortunately, being in the middle of responding to a global pandemic will not prevent your organization from suffering from other business disruptions. Likely disruptions you may face are: Cyber/ phishing attacks – these attacks can cripple your regular communication methods such as email, or may exploit ineffective communications to extract illegal payments.

Every NOC engineer will tell you that the first thing they look for in an outage is “what changed?”. And they are right to look. While every organization is unique, Gartner reports that on average about 80% of IT incidents today are caused by changes in infrastructure and/or software.

Since its inception, OnPage has been dedicated in providing a powerful critical alerting solution. This mission continues in 2020, as OnPage is pleased to introduce its ability to override the silent switch and Do Not Disturb (DND) mode on iOS. The latest advancements ensure that tasked recipients always receive high-priority, OnPage audible alerts, regardless of their current iPhone settings.

Incident and Problem Management are two very different issues in IT service management that are unfortunately often used interchangeably. On the surface, it might just seem like a matter of terminology. But, what if you get to know that one is a small hiccup and the other could dent your entire quarterly or annual results?

And it starts with the company culture. Irrespective of how small or large your team is, it’s wise to invest some time in creating a good on-call onboarding plan. A humane on-call is the mark of a good engineering culture. Being on-call means that you’re expected to be reachable for any issues that may occur during your shift. It’s easy to lose any and all motivation by just anxiously anticipating that mid-dinner ping.

Tanay is the Head of Developer Relations at n8n. He has published books on WebVR, virtual assistants on Raspberry Pi, and FirefoxOS. He has been listed in the about:credits of the Firefox web browser for his contributions to the different open source projects of the Mozilla Foundation. I’ve been involved in the DevOps world for a while and yet I finished reading The Phoenix Project only recently. The book piqued my interest in how teams execute their incident response playbooks.