Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is investigating the state of the UK cloud market, and for good reason. While the submissions and commentary already submitted to the CMA point to various concerning practices, one issue stands out as the single biggest threat to a healthy, competitive landscape: excessive free cloud credits. This tactic, employed by the dominant hyperscalers (AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform), is akin to a drug dealer offering free samples.

The emergence of Ephemeral Environments poses a compelling question: What can organizations expect from adopting this transformative approach? What are the hurdles they may face along the way? And what results can they anticipate? These are the questions I will address in this article as we explore why Ephemeral Environments are garnering attention and what makes them so pivotal for engineering teams today. Let's go!

There’s more pressure than ever to deliver high-availability Kubernetes systems, but there’s a combination of organizational and technological hurdles that make this ‌easier said than done. Technologically, Kubernetes is complex and ephemeral, with deployments that span infrastructure, cluster, node, and pod layers. And like with any complex and ephemeral system, the large amount of constantly-changing parts opens the possibility for sudden, unexpected failures.

In the dynamic world of container orchestration, Kubernetes stands out as the undisputed champion, empowering organizations to scale and deploy applications seamlessly. Yet, as the deployment scope increases, so do the associated Kubernetes workload costs, and the need for effective resource capacity planning becomes more critical than ever. When dealing with containers and Kubernetes you can find yourself facing multiple challenges that can affect your cluster stability and your business performance.

Proper backups are universally acknowledged as essential, yet they grow increasingly tedious and prone to error as DevOps complexity escalates. While some managed database services offer automated backup solutions, the scope of your backup requirements is likely to expand as the business and products scale. There's a considerable chance you'll find yourself hosting your own databases or stateful services, a task that can seem daunting in its demand for precision and reliability.