Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

We recently ran a quick poll where we asked the audience, “When an IT incident occurs at your company, what TV show does it most resemble?” Twenty-three percent of respondents told us that CSI: Crime Scene Investigation resembled them the most. We needed to dig into that a little deeper. Let’s walk through the typical steps of figuring out the root cause, in CSI fashion: Photographs are critical in the world of CSI.

As companies are increasingly built in the cloud, cost management has become a major issue for many engineering teams. While cloud providers like AWS offer flexibility and easy scaling, cloud costs can be opaque and difficult to track. As a result, many companies that rely on the cloud are adopting cloud cost management strategies to understand and manage the charges associated with their cloud-based technology, and maximize cloud usage and efficiency.

On October 22, 2020, Shipa launched a new web series called “Coffee & Containers.” C&C was conceived as a place for practitioners and IT leaders to learn and collaborate on all things microservices, cloud-native, containers, Kubernetes, etc. We were very proud to launch this series with Kelsey Hightower, Thought Leader and Developer Advocate at Google Cloud Platform, and Bruno Andrade, Founder and CEO of Shipa.io.

Regulatory compliance is time-consuming and expensive. A recent survey of IT security professionals found that, on average, organizations must comply with 13 different regulations and spend an average of $3.5M annually on compliance activities, with audit-related activities consuming 232 person hours per year. With a team of five people, that adds up to 1.5 months a year devoted to audit-related activity. That’s a lot of hours that could have been spent on initiatives driving customer value.

DevSecOps — or the merging of Ops and Security — has been at the center of discussion for the better part of the outgoing decade. Today, the complexity of infrastructure change, demands security and DevOps teams to work together more efficiently. But there are hurdles to adoption of DevSecOps as a methodology. Cloud-native applications often live in multiple clouds across data centers, co-location, and public clouds.

Making predictions is a tricky business at the best of times, but especially after a year that turned the world upside down. Even so, we have decided to talk to the IT leaders and discover what we should get ready for in 2021. With technology development, COVID-19 impact, and the new cybersecurity issues happening in the world, the IT engineers responsible for the IT infrastructure monitoring should be always ready to adapt to the new challenges.

To incentivize reliability in your platform, there should be shared goals across your team to measure & quantify the capabilities of your product/service along with customer experience. Define the path of "Always-On" services by understanding few key SRE fundamentals and their implications - SLIs, SLOs & SLA. Framing SRE metrics for building or scaling a product is quite a daunting task.

One thing that 2020 has clearly shown us is that communications services is a basic and fundamental driver of our global economy. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we realized that many tasks can be done at home, if access to communications services is sufficient. Many of us can work from home or other locations outside of the traditional office; students do not have to be physically present at school to participate in lectures; and we don’t need to go to movie theaters watch a new film release.

Nowadays developers are in the driver’s seat regarding a lot of decisions for the tools they use. In this update from Tyler Jewell, he covers what he sees are the Top 5 trends that will take place this year. While it’s a bit of a crowded chart, he plots the companies that he sees driving these trends. If you drill into the Service Catalog trend, Jewell sees a couple of different groups working on ways to help developers deal with the deluge of Services (aka APIs).