Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As we step into another year, its time to reflect back on our most memorable moments & milestones that tell the story of Squadcast in 2021. 😇 The last 12 months have been nothing short of a spectacular journey for us as a company. We raised funding (Yaay!🙌), launched an open-source tool called SLO Tracker, helped organizations globally improve their reliability and made on-call shifts in general less stressful. Here’s how our year went by.

You have probably heard of Log4Shell, the security vulnerability that has ‘earned’ itself an NIST rank of 10: In this post I will show a really basic example of how this vulnerability actually works. I will walk you through some basic usage of the Log4J library and then show how some fairly basic inputs into this library can cause truly unexpected, and potentially disastrous, outcomes.

Most days at Cycle, we go through the day-to-day grind; checking tasks off our endless to-do list, looking forward, and striving towards our goals. We are focused on the small steps throughout each day: head down, working hard, placing one foot in front of the other. But every once in a while, it is necessary to pause, lift our head up, and look back at how far we have come. So, what have we been up to in 2021? We are always listening to user feedback and continuously seeking to improve our platform.

Silos in IT should be a construct of the past. Tight, rigid, and insulated IT silos were an unintentional design flaw of many IT organizations worldwide over the last few decades. Corporate teams would work on their respective piece of the puzzle in isolation, actively completing their tasks, but having little to no input or conversation on how their output contributed to the greater good. When you lay out the flow, it looks something like Figure 1.

Dealing with hundreds of security alerts on a daily basis is a challenge. Especially when many are false positives that waste our time and all take up too much of our valuable time to sift through. Let me tell you how our security team fixed this, as we built security around the JFrog products. First, let me tell you a little bit about our team.

The high risk associated with newly discovered vulnerabilities in the highly popular Apache Log4j library – CVE-2021-44228 (also known as Log4Shell) and CVE-2021-45046 – has led to a security frenzy of unusual scale and urgency. Developers and security teams are pressed to investigate the impact of Log4j vulnerabilities on their software, revealing multiple technical challenges in the process.

Companies are more and more dependent on their IT systems. The reliability and performance of the network are two aspects that should not be neglected. The IT audit is a good way to evaluate the efficiency of the system and avoid bad surprises.

Product thinking should answer the primary question of “what makes the product useful for the intended audience?” The traditional way of product development was more focused on features and then choosing the audience to sell those features, but now it all comes down to users/customers.

Digital transformation has remained an important trend in banking in 2021. Similar to its impact on other business domains, technology is gradually reshaping the financial services industry in every aspect. However, the industry has a long way to go, and banks are still dipping their toes in the digital water, with 27% only launching a digital transformation strategy in 2021. Meanwhile, customers have changed too.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (a.k.a., EC2), is no doubt the core current computing infrastructure. It sits at the heart of AWS, the main kind of structure for housing virtual machines and containers for development and operations. Applying standards of observability with EC2 logs and obviously EC2 metrics (or any kind of AWS metrics for that matter) will inform you on if you have the right sorts of instances in place (and the appropriate size of those instances).