Without SRECon happening this year and the world turned upside down from COVID-19, we set out to hold a virtual event to bring SREs together to share their experiences of what has changed. Last week’s SRE from Home was exactly that. With 1900 registrants, 20 lively Slack channels, six illuminating and entertaining talks from a diverse range of experts in the field and our #askanSRE panel answering attendees’ questions with a candid generosity, it was an amazing, jam-packed day.

Links are so fundamental to web development that they're almost invisible. When we link to a third-party page, we hardly ever consider how it could become an opportunity to exploit our users. In this article, Julien Cretel introduces us to three techniques that bad actors can use to target our users and discusses how to avoid them.

Incident response doesn’t only happen in Slack, so today we’re happy to announce our integration with Zoom to create incident bridges automatically. Using the power of FireHydrant Runbooks, a Zoom meeting can be added with fully customizable titles and agendas based on your incident details. Let’s dive into how it works.

At ecobee, adopting Honeycomb started as a grassroots effort. Engineers signed up for the free tier and quickly started sharing insights with teammates. When it came time for ecobee to make the “build vs. buy” decision for observability tooling, sticking with Honeycomb was the clear choice. Now on the enterprise plan, ecobee’s engineering squads rely on features like SLOs to support the business’s need to map engineering effort to user impact.

At Grafana Labs, we’re big fans of putting ourselves in the shoes of our customers. So when it comes to building a product, dogfooding is a term we throw around constantly. In short, what it means is that we actually use the products we create throughout their entire life cycle. And I really mean the whole life cycle.

Ever watch news coverage of an incoming hurricane? You’ve got those correspondents out there in the elements, wearing their yellow rain ponchos, fighting the wind, and describing the scene to an audience watching at home. That situation reminds me of life as an engineer managing a large-scale IT infrastructure. Although I’m no longer a sysadmin there were certainly days where I had to put on my metaphorical poncho and weather an incoming storm.

In today’s post, we’ll look at two Elixir HTTP client libraries: Mint and Finch. Finch is built on top of Mint. We’ll see the benefits offered by this abstraction layer. We’ll also talk about some of the existing HTTP client libraries in the ecosystem and discuss some of the things that make Mint and Finch different. Finally, we’ll put together a quick project that makes use of Finch to put all of our learning into action. Let’s jump right in!

Kubernetes provides a powerful networking model for microservices. One of the pillars of this model is that each pod has its own IP address and is directly addressable within the cluster. As a consequence, each Kubernetes cluster usually has a flat virtual network that external hosts can’t reach directly. That means routing traffic from clients outside the cluster to services deployed inside the cluster requires some additional work.

The sheer scale of connected devices across physical, virtual, and distributed networks has come to scale that it has become practically impossible for most network administrators to manually keep an eye on each node. Along with the scale, the connectivity between devices within each network has also become denser.

As you build more complicated Splunk apps, you might wonder, “What is the best way to make the features in my app more usable?” If you’re adding new SPL commands or creating ways to input new data sources, the answer is straightforward. But imagine you’re trying to address one of the following scenarios: For cases like these, consider extending the Splunk REST API with custom endpoints.