The Cambridge English Dictionary defines a silo as “a part of a company, organization, or system that does not communicate with, understand, or work well with other parts.” Siloing can exist at various organizational levels: siloed departments, siloed teams within a department, and even siloed engineers within a team. In any industry, siloing can cause issues with alignment, communications, and overall delivery, but in fintech, there are additional risks.

When building alerts, engineers aim to create accurate, timely, and actionable alerts. In pursuit of this goal, many engineers will leverage PromQL throughout their careers. PromQL is the query language used by Prometheus and Alert Manager to query metrics and define alerting rules. While PromQL works very well for simple use cases, as infrastructure scales, architectural patterns grow more complex, engineering practices accelerate, and alerting use cases become more multivariate.

In the observability toolchain, all of our efforts go into data storage and analysis, and the usability of our system becomes a second-class citizen. Autocomplete is a crucial usability feature that significantly improves the developer experience. It is ubiquitous amongst engineering tools from IDEs to CLIs. Autocomplete has long been a feature of many observability tools, but they all miss a crucial detail – optimizing for developer productivity.

Have you ever tried to find a bug in a multi-layered architecture? Although this might sound like a simple enough task, it can quickly become a nightmare if the system doesn’t have proper monitoring. And the more distributed your system is, the more complex it becomes to analyze the root cause of a problem. That’s precisely why observability is key in distributed systems. Observability can be thought of as the advanced version of application monitoring.

Akka’s license change has surprised many of us, but it didn’t come out of nowhere. Lightbend recently announced that Akka will be transitioning from an “Open Source” license to a “Source available” license called BSL 1.1. Let’s unpack this to understand what it all means.