Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Organisations in the banking, insurance, and financial services sectors have been slower than others in moving to the cloud due to concerns over security, data residency, and privacy. For more traditional financial institutions, there is also the not insignificant consideration that their core banking systems are running on decades old on-prem architecture that is just not possible to shift to the public cloud. Nevertheless, adoption of the cloud in banking and finance is happening.

DevOps: Development and Operations joined together in perfect harmony, one feeding the other and vice-versa. That's the dream. But it's easy for the link between the two to be broken. 'Dev' stops talking to 'Ops,' or Ops falls out with Dev, often because of a lack of understanding of each other's goals. That's where Monitoring and Observability come in. They're like the mediators whose job is to make sure the two main players in DevOps keep that metaphorical dialogue open.

OpenTelemetry has been getting a lot of attention in the observability field. Moreover, in StackState’s latest release, we added support for OpenTelemetry traces. Melcom van Eeden, software developer at StackState, was one of our developer champions who made this possible. In addition to joining us on this episode of StackPod, he wrote a blog post on how to leverage OpenTelemetry with StackState and he recorded a tutorial video about the topic.

Microsoft announced the release of System Center 2022 on 1st April. The updated Microsoft System Center Orchestrator product information can be found here. The release brings significant improvements to the System Center suite, including an important update to Orchestrator, which is now a 64-bit application. This new functionality enables Orchestrator to work seamlessly with 64-bit PowerShell within code activities, a revision that has been sort-after by the user base.

One of the great things about being in the telecom industry is the constant innovation that occurs. For example, Microsoft just announced an exciting new offering for telecom service providers, Operator Connect Accelerator, aimed at helping them get the most out of their Teams investments. Operator Connect is Microsoft’s managed service for connecting Teams and telephony services.

We built Upsun because we knew there had to be a better way for businesses to build, run, and scale a full fleet of websites and web apps at scale. After all, until we brought our solution to market, many businesses had to construct a patchwork of different vendors, technologies, platforms, and solutions to bring their digital experiences to life. But there was no guarantee that all of those different component parts would always “play nicely in the sandbox” together.

Testing is crucial in the software development phase. It helps ensure easy debugging, agile code, and enhanced reusability. Performing tests that cover all use cases helps prevent a codebase from breaking — minimizing exposure to vulnerabilities. Python has two main testing frameworks that developers can use, doctest and unittest.