We live in exciting and worrying times. In serverless and containers, we have two amazing technologies that provide productive, machine-agnostic abstractions for engineers to work with. And yet, there seems to be an unbridgeable chasm between the two camps. If you have read anything I wrote in the last two years, you know that I am firmly in the serverless camp. But I was also an early adopter of containers.

Time for another roundup of recent StackStorm Exchange pack updates. It’s easy to miss the new packs and updates to old ones. This month it’s Bolt, Backups, Slack, Jenkins and more. Read on for details.

You were sold the promise of the cloud. The performance gains were going to make everything better. Costs would go down since you’d only be paying for the resources you were actually using. It sounded magical. You’d look like a star and save your company money. Unfortunately, when all was said and done, the cloud didn’t deliver.

In a previous post, we discussed the capabilities and functionalities of Citrix Director, a built-in monitoring tool that is available as a part of Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop deployments. While Citrix Director provides high-level analytics about user sessions, user logon information and logon time breakdowns, connection failures, etc., is it designed to be the end-to-end, single-pane-of-glass performance management solution for Citrix Workspace environments?

A year ago, I introduced a new Slackbot, fondly known as Donut, to PagerDuty. When I interned in San Francisco last summer, I was looking for ways to meet people who weren’t on my team, in my department, or even in the same office as I was. Randomly messaging employees in the Toronto office or on the Sales team seemed like a little much, even for someone like me, who enjoys taking occasional strides outside of her comfort zone.

Last week, we shipped an initial version of Puppeteer Recorder, a Google Chrome extension that records your browser interactions and generates a Puppeteer script. It turns out Chrome extension development is almost like real web development, but with a weird dash of quasi embedded development mixed in. This post talks you through the development lifecycle when creating an extension and lists some of the architectural gotcha’s. Source code for the extension in question is on github.

We’ve just added an integration with Mattermost which means you can now get all of your StatusCake alerts through to this application. Mattermost is a deployable, cloud based, open source alternative to services like Slack, HipChat, and Pushover. The focus is on security and collaboration, with all of the usual essential team functionalities such as File Sharing, Custom integrations, threaded conversations and group messaging.