On January 3, 2018, the Meltdown and Spectre CPU architecture flaws were announced to the world. Due to early leaks, the announcement was made roughly a week earlier than planned. These bugs are easily the largest vulnerabilities announced in the last decade and require a complete reassessment of microprocessor architectures, and how software and hardware interact.

The thought of implementing DevOps can be intimidating and it's not easy. However, the results can be staggering and the metrics are easy to measure. Here are real-world examples of DevOps being implemented and how it positively impacted a company.

Most likely you have heard about Spectre and Meltdown by now. It’s all over the news. As an IT or DevOps engineer, it’s now your job to patch your EC2 instance operating systems. This task can be “fun” if you need to SSH/RDP into every EC2 instance and apply patches. Or, it can be truly fun if you decide to use AWS Systems Manager to apply patches to your OS.

Modern cloud-based data services have revolutionized the way companies manage their data. Tools such as Amazon Athena and Amazon Redshift have changed data warehouse technology, catering for a move towards interactive, real-time, analytical solutions. Both Amazon Athena and Redshift offer their own unique benefits and use cases. Athena provides a cheaper and more portable way to query data while Redshift offers unrivalled performance and scalability.

In June, 2014 we shipped an MVP for Cronitor that was so basic I cringe a little when I think about it. It didn’t do very much, most features were cut, but it shipped with paid subscriptions on day one. We sold one to a friend. My earliest work on subscription integration was primitive: The first month’s charge was captured during the upgrade but we created each subscription by hand in the Stripe dashboard.

Implementing continuous integration at scale is essential to scaling your overall DevOps practice. The tools and technology you use shouldn’t hinder your ability to scale these practices alongside your business. We’ve recently introduced capabilities that allow you to scale your DevOps practices using modern CI/CD and today we’re excited to announce 500 and 1,000 agent tiers in Bamboo. Now you can increase build agent pools to match your team’s size.

Janna Brummel and Robin van Zijll, from ING Netherlands, talked at the Velocity conference in London about how poor availability from their internet banking systems prompted the bank to implement an SRE culture. A centralized SRE team was set up in the Netherlands to provide tooling, consulting and education on reliability to product teams (known as BizDevOps squads internally).

This is the first official release of Up Pro, which includes a number of improvements over the open-source version for production applications. If you’re unfamiliar with Up, it’s a tool which helps you manage and deploy serverless apis, apps and websites in seconds to your own AWS infrastructure. In short: it’s the easiest way to deploy Node.js, Golang, Python among others to AWS, and can cost as little as $1/mo to run or in some cases free.