Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

SREs and Devs are used to solving problems even when an awkward or inefficient way is the only way. In AppScope 1.0, SREs and Devs have a new alternative to standard methods, that the AppScope team thinks will make that problem-solving a lot more fun. We in the AppScope team constantly hear firsthand about life in the SRE trenches. For this blog, we “interview” a fictional SRE/Dev whose thoughts and comments are a mash-up of things we’ve heard from real people we know.

With the exponential rise in cybercrimes in the last decade, cybersecurity for businesses is no longer an option — it’s a necessity. Fuelled by the forced shift to remote working due to the pandemic, US businesses saw an alarming 50% rise in reported cyber attacks per week from 2020 to 2021. Many companies still use outdated technologies, unclear policies, and understaffed cybersecurity teams to target digital attacks.

As you’re settling in with your Monday morning coffee, your email pings. The subject line reads, “Documentation Request.” With the internal sigh that only happens on a Monday morning when compliance is about to change your entire to-do list, you remember it’s that time of the year again. You need to pull together the documentation for your external auditor as part of your annual ISO 27000 and ISO 27001 audit.

For more than 7 years, StatusGator has monitored the world’s status pages and aggregated the status of more than 1,000 cloud services into custom dashboards. With a quick glance, you can see the status of every service you depend on. But what if a website you depend on does not have a status page? What about internal tools, sites you host yourself, and other services without public status information?

From smart lighting, to waste management, to air quality, IoT devices and other “smart city technologies” are rapidly changing life in urban areas. And with a recent MarketsandMarkets research report projecting spending in the market for smart city solutions will nearly double to over $873 billion by 2026, the trend is only set to accelerate.

You might think that a customer seeing a maintenance page message when they land on your website is a bad thing but think again. If you’re clever with your branding, you can really show off your personality, and make website visitors feel better about not being able to access your website. Never thought that could happen, right? Well I’ve put together the best maintenance pages across the years to show you exactly how you can make planned website downtime look like a breeze.

We all know that pay is just as hard as it is important. Having a team distributed over 11+ countries makes pay even harder than in a traditional setup. I joined Checkly in mid-2021 with the promise of a fair and transparent culture in a remote tech startup and my goal was clear: make Checkly one of the best employers in our industry. A topic that I wanted to tackle early on was pay. How can we make pay less nebulous and more transparent, fair, and predictable?

Container technology is changing the way we think about building, shipping, and running applications. Containers are lightweight packages of software that include everything it needs to run an application. This includes operating system components as well as libraries and other dependencies. Emerging technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes empowers organizations to deliver quality software with speed and ease.

In recent years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) development has increased rapidly. Technology has steadily been integrated into the economic and industrial worlds and everyday life in South Africa and worldwide to make our daily activities more convenient and straightforward. Chatbots are becoming increasingly popular for agents to provide better customer care. At the same time, AI in marketing may help determine the optimal moment to engage with a customer via email or social media.