From testing in production to running A/B tests, feature flags have a range of uses. At Sentry, one way we use feature flags is to safely allow beta access to new features for some of our “Early Adopter” customers. Because you can set multiple combinations of feature flags, every user is likely to have a different experience.
In recent times, particularly during the pandemic, working remotely has become the new normal. Not only is it a need of the time, but employers have also started acknowledging the benefits of a remote workforce. Some of these include cost elimination of renting a workspace, access to a wider talent pool, and increased productivity. Furthermore, a better work-life balance also relates to higher employee satisfaction, loyalty and retention.
The Suez Canal has been big news over the last couple of weeks. We wondered how a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) might conduct a postmortem on what happened with the Ever Given, and what that might mean if a comparable incident occurred at a modern tech company.
SaaS or Software-as-a-Service make up a growing amount of business-critical functionality. Gone are the days of hosting every single application necessary to run a successful business. Everything from email hosting, financial systems, and human resources functions are all now done on SaaS-hosted platforms. The knowledge that all of this is out of your hands is both freeing and frustrating.
The adoption of Infrastructure as Code(IaC) has skyrocketed in recent years as engineers seek ways to deploy cloud infrastructure faster and more efficiently. IaC refers to the technologies and processes that manage and provision infrastructure using machine-readable languages (code) as opposed to inefficient manual operations.
When internal IT teams are responsible for ensuring service uptime, it becomes a challenge with cloud applications like Teams – especially when you don’t know the root cause of an outage. The reality for most organizations relying on Microsoft Teams and other Office 365 cloud services is that there’s an innate expectation that service availability is going to be met; Microsoft has enough redundant infrastructure to ensure they can meet their 99.9% service level agreement.
When you start researching how to improve the reliability of your software, you will soon run into terms like SLOs and SLAs. It can sound intimidating, but it's quite straightforward to understand. In this post, we will introduce these terms, the differences between them and how to start using them to make your systems more reliable.