Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Just like shopping on Black Friday, AWS re:Invent has become a post-Thanksgiving tradition for some of us at Datadog. We were excited to join tens of thousands of fellow AWS users and partners for this annual gathering that features new product announcements, technical sessions, networking, and fun. This year, we saw three themes emerge from the conference announcements and sessions.

The observability market is maturing. This evolution is clearly visible in the rise of OpenTelemetry, an open source framework for application performance monitoring and observability.

In the world of IT, there are two main approaches to managing changes—the information technology infrastructure library (ITIL) and continuous integration and continuous delivery/deployment (CI/CD). Both have their own benefits and drawbacks, so it’s important to understand the difference between them before deciding which one is right for your organization. In this article, learn about the difference between CI/CD and ITIL, and find out which approach is best for your needs.

Our industry has always had localized expressions for work that was necessary but didn’t move the company forward. The SRE movement calls this type of work “toil.” The concept of toil is a unifying force because it provides an impartial framework for identifying — then containing — the work that takes up our time, blocks people from fulfilling their engineering potential, and doesn’t move the company forward.

If you're involved in deploying and managing applications and servers, you know that it is a complex and resource-intensive process. Container orchestration platforms help automate the deployment, scaling, and management of your applications, but the challenges don’t stop there. Everything from the way applications communicate, down to the underlying infrastructure they run on, exposes vulnerabilities, complexities, and builds up technical debt.

As software becomes increasingly complex, the need to secure the software supply chain becomes more important — and more difficult. But how can businesses address the challenges of securing their software supply chain? The International Data Corporation (IDC) offers critical insight.

We recently held a webinar, “Find Value at the Edge: Innovation Opportunities and Use Cases,” where Forrester Principal Analyst Michele Pelino was our guest speaker. After the event, we held a Q&A with Pelino highlighting edge infrastructure solutions and benefits. Here’s a look into the interview.

You’ve forgotten to add frontend validation to number fields, and now people are getting an error when they enter text into those fields. However, this is an issue that’s easily preventable—by implementing a proper test that checks for edge cases, but how do get started with software testing? Avoiding bugs in production is just one advantage of testing, it also helps you be more confident about your applications, opens up the potential for a full CI/CD pipeline, and much more.