We’re pleased and honored to be part of the Serverless revolution - continuously innovating to make processes and day-to-day tasks for serverless users more efficient, seamless and enjoyable. So let’s get right into the new and exciting stuff now! Earlier this year, Dashbird launched the very well-received Insights Engine designed to encourage a proactive approach when building and operating serverless applications.

Another year of empowering DevOps teams has passed and what a year it’s been! I’d like to take a moment to reflect on the journey, the milestones and challenges this past year encompassed. The last year has been our most transformational to date. We’ve had a huge amount of ups and downs and I’m incredibly proud to say that we got through it and our organization is more resilient, more aligned in our vision and closer as a result.

Cloud computing can be more complex than anticipated, particularly as agencies continue to move applications and operations into a cloud environment. Does your federal IT team have the in-house skills to ensure cloud computing is helping your agency rather than draining its money and resources?

During my career, I’ve taken part in many on-call rotations and post-mortems. The longest on-call rotation I’ve ever had — no breaks, vacations, or holidays — lasted for a whopping 2.5 years at Lucid Software. I’m jaded. I strongly prefer stability to tinkering with shiny new toys. Very few software engineers start this way, but enough of them make the transition after having been bit enough times by a bad release.

Yes, everyone is talking about the cloud, but are they actually ‘doing it’? The short answer is yes, and in stunning numbers. According to a recent O’Reilly survey, 90+% of organizations expect to increase their usage of cloud-based infrastructure. Over the next 12 months, 67% expect to shift half or more of their applications to the cloud, and 45% are planning to move three-quarters or more of their apps.

As we enter into our 4th year, we've decided to get up close and personal with our team to share with you their passion, drivers, lessons learned and significant moments of the past year. We're a young company dedicated to adding value in all corners that we reach, so we hope you find the upcoming series useful! Hey Marek, so can you tell us how long you’ve been at Dashbird and where you were before? M: I’ve been at Dashbird for two years now.

Incident response playbooks are a set of actions that need to be executed by your incident repsonders depending on the nature of the outage. Having well defined incident response playbooks can be extremely critical, especially during high customer impact events, that you would typically classify as Sev-0 incidents.

Step Functions is a managed service by AWS that implements the Finite-state Machine (FSM) model. You coordinate multiple AWS services into serverless workflows so you can build and update apps quickly. Using Step Functions, you can design and run workflows that stitch together services such as AWS Lambda and Amazon ECS into feature-rich applications. You can read Wikipedia’s definition of a Finite-state Machine, but I think you’ll like the next section more. Keep on reading.

As more and more applications move to the cloud, the complexity of application architectures inevitably increases. It is a burden we willingly take on because the benefits—flexible deployment, technology diversity, independent scaling, and much more— tend to far outweigh the costs. But along this transition, most organizations face a dilemma, to divert resources to the necessary tooling for effective monitoring and troubleshooting of these systems – i.e.

“If I have to pull this car over, there will be trouble!” Does this evoke childhood memories of summer adventures in the family car? It’s the same sort of dread we get when the IT budget holder turns around and threatens to pull over on our journey to the cloud or hybrid cloud. The family summer road trip may be filled with great expectations, but the last thing we want is an unforeseen disruption along the way. And migration to the cloud is no different.