In traditional engineering organizations, development and operations teams are often siloed, a scenario that can lead to friction between them. For example, developers are encouraged to write and release more and better code. Operations engineers are responsible for preventing errors and bugs from affecting customer experiences. As a result, operations teams frequently serve as gatekeepers and can significantly slow deployments down – to ensure everything works first.

Good software development teams are focused on outputs, and can bring key metrics to bear that illustrate just what the engineering organization is building on a daily, monthly and yearly basis. Developer productivity is often assessed retrospectively: if the team is hitting DORA metrics, we assume everything in the lifecycle before production is sound. But the best teams dig deeper, and aim to solve the problem backwards as well as forwards by looking at the process as well as the results.

Kubernetes probes are essential tools for maintaining the health and reliability of applications running in containers. Among these, the liveness probe plays a critical role in checking if an application is running correctly. If it detects any problems, Kubernetes can automatically restart the affected container, thus ensuring the application remains available without manual intervention.

In the fast-paced world of IT, where technologies evolve at lightning speed and the demands on systems and infrastructure are growing exponentially, the temptation to maintain the status quo can be all too enticing. After all, change can be daunting, and the familiar feels safe. What many IT professionals fail to realize, however, is that doing nothing is still a choice – and often, it’s a costly one.