In the first part of this blog journey (I’d call it a post, but it’s actually two posts) we explored what operational excellence looks like in public cloud deployments. And while I do not want to spoil it for you, the main takeaway was that it is not easy and can become resource-intensive. With this in mind, you might should be wondering what you can do to achieve excellence without focusing all your resources on operations.

Businesses are constantly on the lookout for ways to optimize operations, reduce costs, and stay ahead of the competition. One of the most effective strategies for achieving these goals is adopting open-source software (OSS). Open-source tools offer a myriad of benefits, from cost savings to enhanced flexibility and innovation. However, transitioning to an open-source environment can be daunting without a clear roadmap.

ObserveNow, the leading open source-based observability stack, has recently enhanced its capabilities with the introduction of Span Filtering – a key feature in its latest upgrade to Grafana 10.4. This advancement significantly improves the platform’s ability to dissect and analyze traces, which are crucial for understanding the behavior and performance of distributed systems.

When it comes to improving your coding workflow, Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extensions are a fan favorite among devs worldwide. Well-known extensions like Prettier for code formatting, ESLint for identifying and fixing problems, and Live Server for launching a local server are fantastic, but there are plenty of hidden gems offering unique features these popular tools don’t cover. We turned to Reddit to find out which lesser-known VS Code extensions the community’s talking about.

There’s a reason why observability and incident response practices have become standard across modern software development. Anyone wanting to minimize downtime and deliver reliable, available applications needs to have fully instrumented systems and playbooks so they can respond quickly and effectively to outages or incidents. But there’s another piece to the reliability puzzle: resilience testing.

Containerization has deeply changed the way applications are built, deployed, and managed. Containers include both an application and its dependencies, enabling consistent and efficient deployment across diverse environments. However, as applications scale and become more complex, managing numerous containers manually becomes increasingly challenging. Container orchestration streamlines the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.