Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

My favorite ice cream store is just off Richmond Green, close to where I live in West London. On sunny days, locals queue around the block to buy their fantastic gelatos and sorbets. Every one of their customers knows that they could easily nip into the supermarket around the corner to buy hermetically sealed chocolate ice cream, but they queue anyway. Why?

Netflix, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and a host of other companies have adopted chaos engineering, which encourages designing systems to proactively ward off potential issues through testing and the anticipation of failure. When it comes to container orchestration tools like Kubernetes, chaos engineering is a vital tactic for enhancing security.

With the growing popularity of containerized applications, organizations and startups at all levels need to manage their Kubernetes deployments more safely at scale. Today, there is an expanding list of tools and services that can help do this. One of these services is the package manager known as Helm.

Synthetic monitoring lets you improve end user experience by proactively verifying that they can complete important transactions and access key endpoints. But your applications serve many users, from customers to all the employees who run your business. This makes testing the performance of any internal-facing services within your private network just as critical as monitoring your external-facing applications.

ROS, Ripple and reflections – In this month’s edition of The State of Robotics, we’ll tell you about the recently discovered Ripple vulnerability, the latest and greatest in robots reflecting nature, and a dash of news from the ROS universe.

Monitoring requires a multi-faceted approach if DevOps teams want end-to-end visibility and deep insight into issues. This is especially true in the case of modern microservices applications, which are essentially collections of distributed services that talk to each other over a service mesh. With monolithic applications, requests can be tracked easily from the client to the server and back, but with modern applications, every request passes through numerous services before completion.

Talking about competition can be hard. It’s understandable. Product positioning can be touchy subjects especially when those use cases overlap. In the DevOps space, event-driven architectures are certainly not a new concept. Companies like Netflix, LinkedIn, and Facebook have in-house tools built specifically for this type of automation. However, Relay’s mission is make it easy for everyone to build event-driven workflows – not the Netflix-es of the world.