Ask most people what they consider to be the core value of the AWS cloud, and they’ll probably include things like AWS’ scalability and flexibility. While this refers to their public cloud offerings, the same can be said about AWS Outposts—and maybe even more so.

Automation is everywhere in our day-to-day IT practices. Many of the processes that have been created for managing hardware and software components were designed, or at least initiated, in a time when managing only a few instances of an application was the norm. When we look at the work required to create, deploy, and maintain applications at a modern scale, the shortcomings of these processes become apparent.

The global pandemic has drastically accelerated digital transformation initiatives and forced organizations to reimagine customer service by having them take on the incident commander role in managing and responding to customer issues and engaging with customers. In addition to prioritizing digital services, many businesses have migrated to the cloud to increase business agility, develop and deliver new features faster, and meet the growing demands of end users.

Imagine the following scenario: A large retailer experiences a major IT incident that impacts their point-of-sale systems. Their on-call engineers are alerted to the issue and begin their work to resolve it immediately. Behind the scenes, teams are collaborating on a fix, but in the storefront, frustration and tension are growing. Customers are complaining about not being able to check out, and in-store personnel have no good answers as to why the outage happened—or when it will be resolved.

The huge shift to remote work this year has presented many new challenges for IT teams—not least of which is the issue of securing the organization when large numbers of employees are now working at home. At PagerDuty, around a fifth of our employees were already based remotely, but the impact of COVID-19 meant that hundreds of other Dutonians had an almost-overnight switch to working away from the office.

Our reliance on digital services continues to be heightened by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. For work, school, and play, digital remains the primary channel. This puts huge pressure on ITOps and DevOps teams, making it critical that they can collaborate easily to resolve incidents rapidly. Many modern ITOps and DevOps teams rely on one of PagerDuty’s key integration partners, Slack, to meet this need.

How is it already near the end of October? We know our retailer customers have been heads-down thinking about code freezes and hypercare during the high season as we approach the holidays. Disruption and pivoting quickly to meet changing customer expectations is nothing new to the retail industry.

Cloud security has become increasingly complex of late. Cloud providers use tens of thousands of APIs, container orchestration systems are growing in number and complexity, and more platforms and services are entering the cloud-native ring. What’s more, each of these components pose a potential security risk to organizations. And it’s you as the customer that’s responsible for the configuration and security of those components.

In a world that’s always on, keeping services up and running isn’t just ideal—it’s mission-critical for all of PagerDuty’s customers. It’s not lost on us that serving as the central nervous system for digital operations at some of the world’s largest companies is no small job.

DevOps and SRE teams are under intense pressure to reduce the mean time to recovery (MTTR) when resolving incidents. With the proliferation of cloud services and the increasing complexity of DevOps toolchains, engineers today need to not only learn how to use these services, but also troubleshoot them when an incident is raised at 2 a.m. The problem is, many incident response processes are still manual today—cobbling together runbooks and ad hoc scripts and orchestrating people to respond.