Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The first time I was tasked with maintaining a production server, I relied on a checklist my predecessor had left for me. The checklist contained all the maintenance steps along with their corresponding commands. In those early days, I religiously copied each command, double- and triple-checking each character before pressing the Enter key. Slowly but surely, the commands got committed to memory until one day I realized I did not need the checklist.

Terraform is probably the most used tool to deploy cloud services. It's a fantastic tool, easily usable, with descriptive language (DSL) called HCL, team-oriented, supporting tons of cloud providers, etc. On paper, it's an attractive solution. And it's easy to start delegating more and more responsibilities to Terraform, as it's like a swiss knife; it knows how to perform several kinds of actions against several varieties of technologies.

As cloud adoption continues to increase, organizations are recognizing the need for cloud operations. CloudOps, as it’s often called, has become the industry standard for cloud-powered enterprises that intend to get the most out of their cloud services. Previously, it was common for organizations to rush into cloud adoption, with IT operations handling cloud installation, management, and maintenance tasks. The cloud, at the time, was considered to be a complementary extension of on-premise systems.

Package repositories were never something I thought about as a developer unless something didn’t work. For example, if it was slow, wouldn’t connect, wouldn’t install, or was overly complicated to configure. Mostly I wanted something I barely noticed. Something simple and easy to use.

Delivering great performance and reliability for your critical applications just keeps getting harder, doesn’t it? Between microservices, mercurial cloud resources, containers spinning up and down, distributed teams, specialized teams, and developers making changes, it’s an increasingly complex environment. With so many moving parts, if something goes wrong, how do you know what happened where, and what your environment looked like at the precise moment the problem began?

Terraform is a popular choice among DevOps and Platform Engineering teams as engineers can use the tool to quickly spin up environments directly from their CI/CD pipelines.

Robocalling is no small problem. These nuisance calls are the major source of consumer complaints, with some estimates suggesting that more than 22 billion robocalls have been made in 2021 alone – and we’re only halfway through the year.

The CPU attack is one of the most common attack types run by Gremlin users. CPU attacks let you consume CPU capacity on a host, container, Kubernetes resource, or service. This might sound like a trivial exercise, but consuming even small amounts of CPU can reveal unexpected behaviors on our systems. These behaviors can manifest as poor performance, unresponsiveness, or instability.