Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is investigating the state of the UK cloud market, and for good reason. While the submissions and commentary already submitted to the CMA point to various concerning practices, one issue stands out as the single biggest threat to a healthy, competitive landscape: excessive free cloud credits. This tactic, employed by the dominant hyperscalers (AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform), is akin to a drug dealer offering free samples.

In the software development landscape, mastering test automation has become crucial for ensuring efficient quality assurance (QA) processes. Test automation not only accelerates testing cycles but also enhances test coverage and accuracy, leading to higher-quality software releases. This blog explores key strategies for mastering test automation and achieving efficient QA outcomes.

The emergence of Ephemeral Environments poses a compelling question: What can organizations expect from adopting this transformative approach? What are the hurdles they may face along the way? And what results can they anticipate? These are the questions I will address in this article as we explore why Ephemeral Environments are garnering attention and what makes them so pivotal for engineering teams today. Let's go!

We're rolling out Playbooks, our latest in fully automating the incident response process. Imagine every action you (incident responders), had to manually take are now fully automated with Playbooks. Steps like initiating a war room (video conference), logging incidents, sending out alerts, and running diagnostic scripts are now executed with precision, every single time, are all now effortlessly automated without you lifting a finger.

It’s a scenario many developers know all too well: a configuration works flawlessly for one team member but doesn’t work for you. Starting a new job brings with it the excitement of fresh challenges and opportunities. However, it also entails the often painful task of setting up your development environment—a process that can be both time-consuming and complex. This setup phase involves installing dependencies, configuring projects, and troubleshooting issues that might arise.

When organizations begin to deploy resilience testing or Chaos Engineering, there’s a natural question: can we integrate this with our CI/CD pipeline or release automation tools? After all, you’re likely running unit, performance, and integration tests already—is resiliency different? The short answer is yes—to both. Integration is possible, but resiliency is different, so automation is a nuanced conversation.

New subscription for IoT deployments brings security and long term compliance to the most advanced open source stack.

Research firm, IDC, published a study in early February 2024 predicting that Google Cloud Platform (GCP) customers break even after just 10 months. Moreover, the study, The Business Value of Google Cloud IaaS, reported that after migrating to GCP, the participants were on track to achieve a 318% ROI in five years. Here’s the thing. Achieving these milestones requires a robust GCP cost monitoring and optimization plan.