Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The direction of travel for business technology is one-way. The momentum towards strategies around decentralised, hybrid technologies is unstoppable. Examples abound, from the composable software stacks of e-commerce to the ongoing death of monolithic ERP. Modern, digitally-driven business is based on a dynamic alignment of resources, data and technology at the granular level, which is then coordinated precisely.

The pressure to release application features faster to meet the demands of customers presents a number of challenges, including unforeseen deployment delays, custom feature sets, and complex rollbacks when errors occur. To overcome these challenges, developers can use Flagsmith, an open source feature flagging and remote configuration service that allows developers to easily roll out and test new features for a specific subset of users.

As the complexity of modern software development lifecycles increase, it’s important to have a comprehensive monitoring solution for your continuous integration (CI) pipelines so that you can quickly pinpoint and triage issues, especially when you have a large number of pipelines running.

ChatGPT has been the talk of the town for more than four months now. As the first ever artificial intelligence (AI) -powered chatbot, it has quickly gained immense popularity, helping students, engineers and even executives generate content, write and debug code and run market analyses. But could ChatGPT be used for anything other than natural language processing (NPL)? Could it, for example, assist businesses with strategic decision-making? I decided to try it out.

Over the last five years, there has been a constant push to move infrastructure to the Cloud, which accelerated further during the pandemic. It is becoming clear that for a proportion of organisations, the Cloud is not always the best route and that an on-premise (also known as on-prem, on-premises) or a hybrid model is most beneficial. On-premise relates to where IT infrastructure is located; this can be physically in a building, usually in a server room.

During my recent work on extending our GitLab packaging capabilities, I came across various types of tokens that can be used to authenticate users, services, and pipelines while using GitLab CI/CD. Each token has its unique features and use cases that can help ensure the security and integrity of your GitLab environment. By understanding the features and use cases of each token, you can leverage them to enhance your GitLab CI/CD workflows and ensure the security of your GitLab environment.

Catastrophic failures — such as a security breach or a complete outage leading to an unavailable product or service — are classified as Sev0 incidents. On a severity scale of 1–3, Sev0 is dire. It brings business to a complete standstill and may lead to loss of revenue and a damaged reputation. A Sev0 incident usually has no quick workaround; it requires a coordinated effort beyond the engineering team to diagnose, correct, and manage.