Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Here at CloudZero, we’ve made some updates to our dashboard that we’re excited to share with you! I actually prefer this original definition. When you hear the word dashboard, if you’re not thinking about software, you’re probably picturing the place in a car where you have various dials and readouts for safe operation of the vehicle. But did you know what the term dashboard predates cars?

AWS Step Functions is a service that abstracts distributed applications into state machines, with each state representing a component of an application. Not only does this automatically generate an architectural diagram of your application’s workflow, it also makes it straightforward to reorder your states as well as implement parallel execution, retries, and other tasks.

In an ever-changing world, the future of work is changing as well, and it has accelerated some areas of automation that we were already moving toward. I sat down with our guest speaker, Leslie Joseph, Principal Analyst Serving Application Development and Delivery at Forrester Research, for a webinar to discuss these questions and get a better understanding around how automation plays an important role in supporting companies through crises and preparing them for an uncertain future.

Don’t wait for an incident to focus on reliability. Learn concrete steps for preventing incidents in the first place in our two-part series, Planning and Architecting for Reliability. It’s 3 a.m. You’re lying comfortably in bed when suddenly your phone starts screeching. It’s an automated high-severity alert telling you that your company’s web application is down. Exhausted, you open the website on your phone and do some basic tests.

San Jose, CA, September 15, 2020 —OnCommand Insight (OCI) users worried about ongoing support, updates, and upgrades for NetApp’s legacy tool now have an alternative platform to migrate to that is operational in 250+ of the largest enterprises as a future-proofing multi-cloud solution, proven to avoid disruption. OCI users can immediately transition to VirtualWisdom by Virtana with plug-and-play ease and financial incentives.

Webhooks, so what are they good for? Well, quite a lot as it turns out! Webhooks are great for integrating Cloudsmith with other systems that you use, by sending data or notifications to other tools in your stack and helping to enable automation across your workflows. I know what you’re thinking, this sounds a lot like an API right? Well, not quite. Webhooks are almost like a sibling of an API call. So, what’s the real difference?

The myriad of different fields that make up robotics makes QA practices difficult to settle on. Field testing is the go-to, since a functioning robot is often proof enough that a system is working. But online tests are slow. The physical environment must be set up. The entire system has to be in a workable state. Multiple runs are needed to build confidence. This grinds development to a halt.

A headline in a recent Register article jumped off my screen with the claim: “No, Kubernetes doesn’t make applications portable, say analysts. Good luck avoiding lock-in, too.” Well, that certainly got my attention…for a couple of reasons. First, the emphasis on an absolute claim was quite literally shouting at me. In my experience, absolutes are rare occurrences in software engineering. Second, it was nearly impossible to imagine what evidence this conclusion was based on.

So that’s the summer gone (hopefully, that heat was awful). Or winter if that’s where you are. Seasons change and so does the state of robotics. Fortunately, that’s what we’re here for. Before we get into it, as ever, If you’re working on any robotics projects that you’d like us to talk about, be sure to get in touch.

So what exactly is observability? Is it just a new-fangled term for 'monitoring'? Well, no. Observability goes further than mere monitoring. Observability involves the combination of 3 pillars – Metrics, Logs, and Tracing – to give a much more in-depth view of what your application is doing. Observability offers proactive insights into how your application and/or infrastructure are likely to behave, whereas monitoring is only reactive in nature.