Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The latest News and Information on DevOps, CI/CD, Automation and related technologies.

What is a Tier 1 IP backbone, and why does it matter?

Every time you join a video meeting, move data between cloud environments or use an AI-powered application, your traffic travels across a complex network of interconnected infrastructure. At the heart of this global ecosystem sits the internet backbone – and the highest-performing networks within it are known as Tier 1 IP backbones.

What AI compresses, and What it Amplifies

Adam Berman, VP of Engineering at Semgrep, on the double edge of AI tools for engineering leaders: they compress the distance between an idea and a working prototype, letting him get from exploration to a demoable POC in the gaps between meetings. But that same leverage amplifies risk. One person can spin up 1,000 unowned problems just as fast as they can spin up 1,000 wins. From a Braintrust by Cortex conversation on how AI is changing the job of engineering leadership.

AI Was Supposed to Mean Working Less. For Some Developers, It's Doing the Opposite.

AI coding tools were supposed to mean developers work less. On a recent webinar recorded with LeadDev, senior engineering manager Vernon put words to something a lot of teams are quietly noticing instead: “It’s concerning because it’s the opposite of what was promised. We were supposed to be working less.”

TLS 1.2 isn't end of life, but it will be soon

You’re probably running a TLS configuration that the IETF says is “non-conformant”. But you didn’t do anything wrong. In July, the IETF published a pair of RFCs that took away three of TLS 1.2’s key exchange methods and froze the rest of it. The phrase they used is MUST NOT, the strongest thing a specification is allowed to say. Nginx, Apache, and Windows Server all ship with those key exchanges turned on by default. Nothing breaks tomorrow.

AI Agent Builder: Create Agents That Fit Your IT Environment

AI agents are quickly becoming part of the enterprise automation conversation because, among other things, they help teams move faster. But there is a major difference between an AI agent that sounds useful in a demo and an AI agent that is ready for production. Production agents need scope. They need to know what they own, which systems they can touch, which workflows they can run, which teams they support, and where the boundaries are.

Chaos Monkey Won't Find Your Bug

We shipped a chaos feature that never caused any chaos. Our mock server has had a fault-injection effect for years with a straightforward job: withhold the response entirely and see whether the caller copes. Last week I audited it against the actual code path. It had never withheld anything. The handler returned early without writing a response. Go’s net/http then did what it is designed to do, which is synthesize a 200 OK and flush the recorded body.

Migration feasibility checklist for IT leaders

Feasibility is a prioritization question that comes before strategy. The five-question check produces a "now, later, or fix blockers first", before anyone touches a target architecture. Strategy earns its place once feasibility returns "now." Feasibility comes before strategy. Before anyone designs a target architecture, builds a runbook, or commits to a multicloud operating model, the question is whether the migration is the right move now, and what would make it fail.

Cloud cost management: how repatriation improves control for UK enterprises

Hyperscale providers are nothing if not consistent in their temptation of enterprise IT buyers. They bombard leaders with a simple message: migrate to the public cloud, shut down data centres, and enjoy both financial savings and operational agility. However, as UK enterprises have scaled their digital footprints, a more nuanced reality has bitten. Public cloud costs have swollen.

The finance dashboard I actually use, built from CloudZero and Campfire in an afternoon

Every finance person I know lives in the same loop approaching the end of the month, quarter, or fiscal year. Leadership wants to know where the financials will land (most times before the close has occurred). CS wants customer margins. Someone on the People team needs each department’s AI spend for an OKR review, and they need it quickly to make business decisions. Each answer sits in a different tool or a different spreadsheet, and I bounce across all of them several times a day.

Shipped: In-app help, right beside your work

You are mid-investigation, chasing a spike or pulling a number for finance, and you hit a term or a workflow you need to look up. You should not have to lose your place to find an answer. Guide lives in a fixed spot in the left sidebar, always one click away. It opens a panel on the right side that sits beside your page instead of covering it. Your chart, filters, and time range stay exactly where they were. Nothing gets rebuilt and you keep the thread of what you were investigating.