Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

When are you smarter than your playbooks, and when are your playbooks smarter than you? That’s a question that engineers rarely step back to consider. The rational, disciplined parts of our minds tell us that the playbooks we are supposed to follow were carefully designed and tested, and that we should stick to them at all costs.

To quote my colleague, Chad, WordPress “remained tremendously popular since its release in 2003”. For many, WordPress remains by far the CMS that is easiest to adopt, and that provides a fast time to market in the majority of use cases. There is so much high-quality material out there for WordPress, be it OSS or Premium, that one can have beautiful sites powered by an easy-to-use CMS up and running in no time.

ServiceNow is a workflow automation platform used by organizations for their IT ticketing and project management needs. In contrast, Squadcast is an end-to-end incident management and SRE platform that is used by organizations for their reliability requirements.

Organizations around the world are turning to DevOps as a way of working together to improve the efficiency and quality of software delivery and increase value to the business. But what exactly is DevOps and what does it mean for you and your organization? Welcome to DevOps 101. Our new monthly webinar series aims to explain exactly this. Each live session will be hosted by me, Grant Fritchey, starting with the fundamentals to expand your knowledge and understanding of DevOps.

Ten years ago, tools like Jenkins were first-class automation platforms for your CI pipelines. The jump from lower-level tools and custom scripts to tools like Jenkins created dramatic improvements. Now, a new generation of web-based tools are available. They provide a platform for the next leap forward for product build automation. This long history means that many mature organizations use Jenkins for CI.

Kubernetes has become an enormously popular choice for containerized applications since its 2014 launch. Many software developers rely on the tool, which is now in v1.23.1. However, there are other choices on the market for container orchestration. One such tool is Nomad, originally launched in 2015. Generally pitched as an alternative to Kubernetes, Nomad, which most recently released v1.2, promotes itself as a simple, flexible option for software teams.

The best free and open-source software are tools that users simply cannot live without — they make everyday tasks on Windows, Mac, and Linux easy without any of the associated costs or licensing fees that come with pay-to-play solutions. For some quick background, open-source software took off during the earlier days of IT in the late 1990s and has changed the world ever since.