What is Black Friday? The name originated in the US and it was given to the shopping day after Thanksgiving Day, which is the fourth Thursday in November with many Americans on holiday the following day. As most people are off work on the Friday following Thanksgiving, shops started cutting prices to entice customers just for one day and get the Christmas shopping season underway.

In new and quickly-expanding fields like serverless, long-standing experts are few and far between. I am excited to welcome Tim Wagner, the original leader of the serverless movement, to the Stackery Board of Directors. Tim spent six years at Amazon Web Services as the General Manager of AWS Lambda, where he oversaw the team that built the success of serverless as a platform. In many ways, we have them to thank for creating the environment that supports Stackery and the serverless ecosystem.

Vertica is a platform that uses machine learning capabilities to help you analyze large amounts of data. Vertica provides high availability and parallel processing by replicating data onto multiple nodes in a cluster, and uses a column-based data store for efficient querying. You can deploy Vertica in the cloud, on premise, or as a hybrid of the two.

Earlier this month, Ivana Huckova, one of Grafana’s junior developers, wrote an article about how to contribute to Grafana as a junior dev. As an open-source project supported by engineers around the world, Grafana strongly encourages anyone to contribute. And ICYMI, there are many opportunities to help: Testing the UI and reporting issues, finding and fixing bugs, and improving the documentation are just a few.

StackStorm is headed for the Linux Foundation! This is a big move and we're excited to share this news with our community. For several months now we've been working with the Linux Foundation, the StackStorm team, and many others inside Extreme to make this move possible. We want to thank everyone for their effort to make this move happen. StackStorm's community continues to grow and the impact the project has had continues to show, and show, and show, and show (you get the point).

Sharp growth driven by proven, industry-only solution for reducing end-user experience issues that impact the clinician’s virtual workspace and access to EHR applications and improves patient care.

Instrumenting the performance of custom code (the code you write, not the libraries you require) in web apps has been a thorn in my side for years. Yes, we have a custom instrumentation API, but raise your hand if you enjoy sprinkling your code with this? Anyone? Having a custom code instrumentation blackhole doesn't matter if your app spends almost all of its time in common libraries that Scout instruments by default (ex: ActiveRecord, Redis, View Rendering, and HTTP calls).

Since Google open sourced Kubernetes in 2014, it has become one of the most popular open source projects. Adopted by all major cloud providers, Kubernetes has undoubtedly become the de facto container orchestrator. But what is Kubernetes and container orchestration really about? Without the technical background and knowledge about the technology developments that preceded it, it can be challenging to wrap your head around it.

ChatOps is the implementation of chatbots to unify communication and collaboration. Through ChatOps every single member of a team will be aware of what the other members are working on. It is the logical next step in the evolution of communication among teams after email and IM. Projects of today are developed at a global scale with millions of people as potential users, this means that teams are larger and often work in shifts or even remotely.

Here at Lumigo, we are big fans of serverless. And a big part of working with AWS Lambda involves using many other AWS services. For example, services such as SNS and SQS are often used to chain Lambda functions together. They are essential ingredients of an event-driven architecture, where systems are loosely coupled through events. However, they also pose a challenge to how we test our systems and how to get fast feedback on what’s happening in the system.