Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Passwords are dying. The cost of creating and maintaining passwords is becoming untenable. Which can be seen in the rise of users logging in with social products and developers outsourcing their pain to Auth0 and the likes. We decided to sidestep the password based authentication and went passwordless on our new product. Read on to see how you can go passwordless too.

Get started with Gremlin's Chaos Engineering tools to safely, securely, and simply inject failure into your systems to find weaknesses before they cause customer-facing issues. API gateways are a critical component of distributed systems and cloud-native deployments. They perform many important functions including request routing, caching, user authentication, rate limiting, and metrics collection. However, this means that any failures in your API gateway can put your entire deployment at risk.

With version 3.4, StackStorm code itself will only run on Python 3. For the v3.4 release, we have chosen to run on Python 3.6 across all of our supported platforms. For users still on Ubuntu 16.04, you will need to source your own Python 3.6 packages, but we have been using the Python 3.6 Ubuntu PPA without many issues. Looking forward to StackStorm 3.5, we will be removing the ability to install Python 2 packs.

What is DevOps? DevOps is a term for a cluster of concepts that has become a movement, “a cross-disciplinary practice dedicated to the study of building, evolving and operating, rapidly-changing resilient systems at scale.” (Jez Humble) The definition of DevOps is not agreed upon by everyone because of the complex processes attached to the term, however, the benefits to teams are universally agreed upon.

There are many hidden costs in running sub-optimal IT operations, that most organizations don’t consider. Enterprises often look at service downtime as their only KPI, but that is really only the tip of the iceberg. Without a properly operating incident management lifecycle, enterprises tend to support poorly performing services instead of fixing them.

We’re excited to announce Incident Timer - a “days without an incident” timer for software teams to keep track of major engineering incidents. As the people behind Spike.sh, we keep discussing how to build a culture of reliability with our customers. We loved the idea of safety/accident timers in factories which kept track of major accidents. It's a simple and elegant way to keep safety on everybody’s minds.

Growth engineering is a practice in which product, engineering, and design support a company’s growth efforts from within the product itself. Growth engineering has gained traction in consumer-facing companies. This practice has gained plenty of traction in the SaaS world over the last decade, to help support growth of self-serve users who often purchase services without the involvement of traditional sales teams.

In this blog post, we’re going to talk about k3d, a tool that allows you to run throwaway Kubernetes clusters anywhere you have Docker installed. I’ve anticipated your questions…so let’s go!