Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The adoption of Infrastructure as Code(IaC) has skyrocketed in recent years as engineers seek ways to deploy cloud infrastructure faster and more efficiently. IaC refers to the technologies and processes that manage and provision infrastructure using machine-readable languages (code) as opposed to inefficient manual operations.

When you start researching how to improve the reliability of your software, you will soon run into terms like SLOs and SLAs. It can sound intimidating, but it's quite straightforward to understand. In this post, we will introduce these terms, the differences between them and how to start using them to make your systems more reliable.

There’s no question that engineering teams at innovative tech companies are busy. No matter how successful your company is, there’s always a long backlog of feature enhancements that can make it challenging to focus on other priorities. So, it’s no surprise that one of the most common questions we get from companies that engage with us is “How much of an effort will this be for my engineering team?” The short answer is that you can get value within minutes.

The terms “workload” and “application” are sometimes thrown around interchangeably, but they are not the same, and it’s important to understand the difference.

Since 2018, over 2,400 SQL Server professionals have provided valuable insights into how they monitor and manage their estates, and what challenges they’re facing, through the only industry-wide survey of its kind. The results of the annual survey have not only benefited the community but also helped us better understand how we could shape our own product development to deliver more value where organizations need it.

There’s no doubt the cloud is having a big impact on the nature and make-up of SQL Server estates. The 2021 State of Database DevOps report from Redgate, for example, showed that 58% of organizations now use the cloud either wholly or in combination with on-premises servers, compared to 46% in the same report a year earlier.

In recent times, particularly during the pandemic, working remotely has become the new normal. Not only is it a need of the time, but employers have also started acknowledging the benefits of a remote workforce. Some of these include cost elimination of renting a workspace, access to a wider talent pool, and increased productivity. Furthermore, a better work-life balance also relates to higher employee satisfaction, loyalty and retention.

The Suez Canal has been big news over the last couple of weeks. We wondered how a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) might conduct a postmortem on what happened with the Ever Given, and what that might mean if a comparable incident occurred at a modern tech company.