2011 was a big year for pop culture: Prince William and Kate Middleton tied the knot, Ashton Kutcher replaced Charlie Sheen in Two and a Half Men, and the theatrical release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 marked the end of an era. While our eyes were turned to the screen, something else was happening—two former co-workers were deciding it was time to start a new adventure together. Know what that means?

Imagine that you are a taxi driver deftly navigating busy city streets to get your passenger to the airport on time and to prove that taxis remain relevant in a changing world of Uber and Lyft. If you had a choice of routes would you opt for a well-lit route with excellent visibility versus a route where some of the street lights were out and visibility is a challenge?

Many Industry and Operations (I&O) Leaders working in end-user computing today can attest to that famous Dylan lyric. In Gartner’s latest Market Guide on Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) they report that “by 2023, 60% of digital business intiatives will require I&O to report on user’s digital experience, up 15% from today”. Compare that to just a decade ago when I&O Leaders rarely had to think about their employees’ digital experiences when making decisions.

It’s been a great couple of months at Stackery. Since coming on as CEO earlier this year, I’ve been impressed with how much our team gets done and their contributions to making the serverless development experience easier and more reliable. I want to take a moment to recognize two of our amazing Stackerinos who were recognized by AWS recently with the AWS Serverless Hero distinction.

If your work in IT, especially in the software field, then you’re almost certainly aware of logs. An application that doesn’t generate any type of logging would be unheard of, to say the least. What about “log analytics?” Do you know this term?

Managing a cloud system properly entails numerous tasks (performance monitoring, response times, latency, uptime management, security, compliance, and disaster recovery). Together, these tasks form a comprehensive holistic strategy that embraces and accounts for all potential scenarios. Especially in today’s intensive business landscape, running cloud operations (NOC) 24/7 has become mandatory together with maintaining a high availability of network services.

AWS re:Invent is an annual gathering of tens of thousands of AWS staff, partners, and users for a full week of keynote sessions, feature announcements, customer case studies, hands-on workshops, and more. As in years past, we will be there with dozens of engineers, ready to answer your monitoring questions and show you the newest additions to Datadog.

The Azure Marketplace makes it easy for customers to identify, subscribe to, then use SaaS and API solutions by removing barriers in the procurement process for purchasing those products. By using the existing payment terms they have with Microsoft, Azure customers can click through a simple workflow to purchase an ISV solution without needing to negotiate new terms or speak directly with an Azure or ISV representative.

Traditional Runbooks can become 10x more useful if they were automated or at least made executable (partly, if not fully). Shreyash Naithani from Microsoft Azure SRE team and author of "Practical Site Reliability Engineering" talks about how to take advantage of runbooks to eliminate toil.

Before diving into Git, it’s important to understand the concept of version control at a high level. While not all software developers utilize version control, nor is software development the only industry that does, it is becoming more mainstream every year. And you can bet you will be confronted with version control as a developer if you ever collaborate with others on a workplace team or on open source projects.