On January 3, 2018, the Meltdown and Spectre CPU architecture flaws were announced to the world. Due to early leaks, the announcement was made roughly a week earlier than planned. These bugs are easily the largest vulnerabilities announced in the last decade and require a complete reassessment of microprocessor architectures, and how software and hardware interact.

Application performance management (APM)—sometimes referred to as application performance monitoring—is used to refer to monitoring tools that allow IT, developers, and business leaders to monitor their backend application architecture to resolve performance issues and bottlenecks in a timely manner.