Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

When I began my career in IT more than two decades ago, most organizations had multiple silos of application development teams. Each team would be responsible for a single application or sometimes two and nothing else. Developers would spend days, weeks, or months working on a single release containing countless enhancements and improvements. Release day was a pressure cooker, with IT pros sometimes working on the deployment overnight, hoping nothing went disastrously wrong.

Modern IT environments are so complex, dynamic, and expansive that humans alone cannot effectively manage and maintain them. As a developer and operator, I have had to deal with failed servers and containers, running out of storage space, slow or unreliable network links, bugs in code, and unpredictable workloads in some applications.

Each year, SolarWinds publishes the IT Trends report, a collection of responses to survey questions meant to gain insight into the world of IT. I enjoy the IT Trends report for a variety of reasons, but my favorite reason is because I get to examine the raw data and draw conclusions! While reviewing the data and findings this year, I noted the demographic data collected included the number of years of IT experience for the survey respondents.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, denial-of-service (DoS) attacks impacting availability have been rising. The attacks aren’t only affecting Russia and Ukraine either. Public and private organizations in multiple industries have been impacted, and several nations—including the U.S. and U.K.—have issued warnings about cyberthreats from Russia.

In today’s fast-paced business environment, tech startups are on the rise. Several small- and medium-scale businesses are competing with established companies to showcase their unique digital services. Heroku is a favorite among these businesses and their development teams, as its PaaS provides a ready-to-serve platform for application setup. Developers can deploy the platform easily without investing too heavily in the infrastructure and DevOps setup.

One of the most important pieces of operating any application stack is making sure you’re aware of the logging events occurring on your running systems. If your development team is like most, then you collaborate with your colleagues using Slack. Being successful while building and operating software includes looking for ways to implement high-visibility operations within your team communication platform.

A data warehouse (DW) is a centralized repository of data integrated from multiple systems.. This data is often cleansed and standardized before being loaded. Designed to support analytical workloads, a data warehouse can help organizations better leverage both current data and historical data to improve decision-making through the analysis of business processes and outcomes.

Over the past two to three years, I’ve seen customers make a move towards both MySQL and PostgreSQL. There is no software licensing with either of these database systems, which can benefit companies, and developers love the community support for them.