Containers and serverless computing are two of today’s hottest technologies for application deployment. When used the right way, they both help DevOps teams to deploy applications faster and more cost-effectively. Although the features of containers and serverless architectures overlap in some respects, they are not interchangeable technologies. Containers work better for some use cases, while in others, serverless is what you need.

You’ve probably seen mentions of Docker over the past few years. This guide explains the basics so you can get up and running with Docker for PHP in your local development environment.

Exception handling in Java isn’t an easy topic. Beginners find it hard to understand and even experienced developers can spend hours discussing how and which Java exceptions should be thrown or handled. That’s why most development teams have their own set of rules on how to use them.

I recently read an article in the Wall Street Journal about the need for companies to take into account what their employees’ needs are when rolling out new technologies. Many new technology initiatives fail because employees aren’t involved in the process at some level — whether it’s helping design a solution to their problems or providing regular feedback to their leadership teams on what’s working and what they need to be successful.

In part one of this series, I recapped a good bit of the fireside chat with Kelsey Hightower, Caleb Hailey, and Sean Porter at Sensu Summit 2018. They discussed the evolution of monitoring tools and related DevOps technologies, and how to incorporate new tools into both modern and legacy infrastructure.

If you’ve ever created products that can be deployed in different types of environments, you know that it can be challenging to migrate between one and the other since the core architecture often needs to be very different. We learned this the hard way back in 2018 on Confluence, when a large number of customers trying to migrate from server to cloud were having problems. It was a challenging, prone-to-failure process that required a lot of attention and preparation from site admins.

Organizations of all sizes—but, in particular, the larger ones—view hybrid cloud infrastructures as the new normal. The Rightscale 2019 State of the Cloud Report from Flexera (registration required) surveyed close to 800 business, IT, and development professionals around the globe. They worked for both large and small organizations across a wide range of verticals.

For customer-facing SaaS companies, setting up an alerting tool is a no-brainer. In the current climate of always-on services, companies need assurance that customers are getting the service they demand and expect – all the time. But many organizations still struggle to notify the right people at the right time. If your data center is on fire and you alert Karen while she’s vacationing in the Greek Isles, you (and poor Karen) have a problem.

For many years I have been using an application called OSSEC for monitoring my home network. The output of the application is primarily email alerts which are perfect for seeing events in near real-time. In this post, I’ll be showing you how to build a good high-level view of these alerts over time with Loki, Prometheus, and Grafana.

Amazon Managed Streaming for Kafka (MSK) is an AWS service that helps build and run applications built on Apache Kafka. Kafka is a platform designed to handle continuous streams of small records or events generated from a large number of devices and applications.