Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The financial services industry has evolved at an astonishing rate in recent years, underpinned by rapid advances in technology. Financial institutions (FIs) are digitising their customer journeys and scaling-up transformation. Cloud is a catalyst for enterprise business transformation and is a focus for C-suite executives and board members of financial services organisations.

Organisations in the banking, insurance, and financial services sectors have been slower than others in moving to the cloud due to concerns over security, data residency, and privacy. For more traditional financial institutions, there is also the not insignificant consideration that their core banking systems are running on decades old on-prem architecture that is just not possible to shift to the public cloud. Nevertheless, adoption of the cloud in banking and finance is happening.

DevOps: Development and Operations joined together in perfect harmony, one feeding the other and vice-versa. That's the dream. But it's easy for the link between the two to be broken. 'Dev' stops talking to 'Ops,' or Ops falls out with Dev, often because of a lack of understanding of each other's goals. That's where Monitoring and Observability come in. They're like the mediators whose job is to make sure the two main players in DevOps keep that metaphorical dialogue open.

OpenTelemetry has been getting a lot of attention in the observability field. Moreover, in StackState’s latest release, we added support for OpenTelemetry traces. Melcom van Eeden, software developer at StackState, was one of our developer champions who made this possible. In addition to joining us on this episode of StackPod, he wrote a blog post on how to leverage OpenTelemetry with StackState and he recorded a tutorial video about the topic.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a fully managed container orchestration service that makes it easy for you to deploy, manage and scale containerized applications. Although ECS is a managed service and hides many complexities under the hood, there have been many cases where startups have not been able to take full advantage of ECS due to slow deployments. In this article, we will share some tips to improve deployment speed on ECS. We will try to cover both EC2 tasks and Fargate tasks.

One of the great things about being in the telecom industry is the constant innovation that occurs. For example, Microsoft just announced an exciting new offering for telecom service providers, Operator Connect Accelerator, aimed at helping them get the most out of their Teams investments. Operator Connect is Microsoft’s managed service for connecting Teams and telephony services.

We built Upsun because we knew there had to be a better way for businesses to build, run, and scale a full fleet of websites and web apps at scale. After all, until we brought our solution to market, many businesses had to construct a patchwork of different vendors, technologies, platforms, and solutions to bring their digital experiences to life. But there was no guarantee that all of those different component parts would always “play nicely in the sandbox” together.

Testing is crucial in the software development phase. It helps ensure easy debugging, agile code, and enhanced reusability. Performing tests that cover all use cases helps prevent a codebase from breaking — minimizing exposure to vulnerabilities. Python has two main testing frameworks that developers can use, doctest and unittest.