Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

OpenTofu has emerged as the true open successor to Terraform, restoring transparency and community ownership after Terraform’s shift to a restrictive BSL license. With features like OCI registries, encryption at rest, and a public RFC process, it’s already outpacing Terraform’s innovation.

Deploying web apps can feel overwhelming. Multiple moving parts, including frameworks, hosting, databases, and automation tools make having a smooth, automated workflow seem impossible. But having an automated workflow is worth the effort; you can focus on building features and improving your app instead of worrying about manual deployments or server management.

The data is there, but it’s scattered across domains, formats, and vendors. Teams are often left piecing together an incomplete story of what went wrong, long after the damage has been done. Now, a new open standard is changing that. OpenTelemetry (OTel) is fast becoming the connective tissue of modern observability—an open-source framework designed to make telemetry data (metrics, logs, and traces) universally accessible.

In large tech organizations, keeping track of every laptop, desktop, and endpoint is one of the IT department’s toughest challenges. Each device needs to be accounted for, properly assigned, and compliant with the organization’s policies, all while teams, offices, and contractors constantly change.

Modern cloud-native infrastructure was adopted to increase agility and scale, but as it grows in scale and complexity, engineering teams are now drowning in operational noise. Industry research (The State of Observability for 2024) reveals that 88% of technology leaders report rising stack complexity, while 81% say manual troubleshooting actively detracts from innovation.

Learn how to visualize time series data from InfluxDB 3 Core using popular open source Apache Superset. This tutorial walks you through setting up both systems with Docker, writing sample IoT data, and creating your first visualization. For more information about Apache Superset, this article may be helpful.

As companies race to ship AI features into production, FinOps teams everywhere are scrambling to keep up with the variability of their engineers’ new favorite toys. The rapid pace of AI experimentation is creating a new wave of unpredictable usage patterns and costs.

As organizations scale Kubernetes and hybrid infrastructures, many are realizing that more tools don’t mean better security. A recent Microsoft report found that organizations with 16+ point solutions see 2.8x more data security incidents than those with fewer tools. Yet platform teams are still expected to deliver resilience and performance across containers, VMs, and bare metal, often while juggling fragmented tools that introduce risk, downtime, and complexity.

Running distributed systems means you need clear visibility into how your services behave. Prometheus has been the standard for metrics for a long time, and OpenTelemetry is now giving teams a more consistent way to collect telemetry across their stack. In many setups, you'll have both: existing Prometheus instrumentation that's already in place, and new components instrumented with OpenTelemetry.

I'm excited to share that we're launching Braintrust by Cortex, a podcast I've been wanting to create for a while now. After years of building Cortex and working with engineering leaders across industries, I’ve noticed an opportunity for conversations that dig deeper into the daily work of building great engineering teams.