Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

A vulnerability scanner will hand you more work in one afternoon than the service desk can clear in a quarter. Thousands of findings arrive ranked by severity, every one of them technically actionable. Fixing them takes weeks, and in most organizations the backlog grows faster than it clears. That gap is what this guide is about. Every tool here scans reliably, scores findings sensibly and reports clearly.

This month, we wanted to spotlight some of the new cloud features that shipped last month and are enabling teams to keep pace with database estates that increasingly span multiple platforms and providers. We also have updates for Monitor Enterprise users that improve alerting for permission changes. Here's what's new in Monitor.

AI coding agents are moving the software bottleneck from writing code to validating it. Here’s what that means for CI infrastructure, capacity planning, and software quality. This topic is explored in more detail in “CI Can’t Keep Up With AI,” an episode of Uplink, where Aditya “JP” Jayaprakash, Co-founder and CEO of Blacksmith, discusses how AI coding agents are reshaping CI and software delivery. Table of Contents.

Traditional code review no longer keeps pace with how much code teams are shipping. Risk-based code review is the response: instead of giving every pull request the same scrutiny, you route human attention by risk, letting low-risk changes ship with light or automated review and reserving deep human review for the changes that are expensive to get wrong.

As financial institutions move from AI experimentation to autonomous operations, trusted context, governance, and observability become the foundation for enterprise-scale Agentic AI. Artificial intelligence in financial services is entering a new era. Historically, financial services companies have focused on deploying generative AI to improve productivity, enhance customer experiences, accelerate software development, and streamline operations.

Yesterday (5 August), the WooCommerce team urged store owners to immediately update the WooCommerce Stripe Gateway following the discovery of a critical security vulnerability in the Stripe for WooCommerce plugin. This is the second urgent security update in less than 30 days, with the previous advisory issued on 14 July. It serves as another reminder that cyber threats evolve quickly, and delaying updates can leave your online store exposed. The lesson isn’t limited to WooCommerce.

AI SRE is having a moment. The category pulled in massive funding rounds over the last two years, Gartner published its first market guide, and vendors are promising everything from 90% faster resolution to fully autonomous incident response. If you run an engineering organization, someone has probably pitched you an AI SRE in the last quarter. And let’s be honest: faster triage, less alert fatigue, and automated frontline response are wins for understaffed teams.

Let me start with something most Kafka contributors think but rarely say out loud: nobody understands all of Kafka. I'm not a core committer and have only contributed a few times, but those contributions I have made have been in part thanks to using coding assistants. There are some issues with this approach though, the Apache Kafka project is huge. It's split into many parts: the core, the server, the client libraries, the streams engine, the storage layer, the consensus code, and more.

At Harness, we build an AI-powered software delivery platform, and test result data is core to how we help engineering teams ship faster. The table that stores it started small: one row per record, all the context right there on the row. Simple, readable, and it worked. Until it didn't. This is the story of how we refactored it, what we learned, and what I'd tell you to watch for in your own systems.

Here's the uncomfortable truth about the Mythos era: knowing about a vulnerability and being able to neutralize it are two entirely different problems. AI models like Mythos are finding vulnerabilities 10x faster than humans ever could. Project Glasswing participants discovered over 10,000 high and critical vulnerabilities in their applications. Firefox alone had 271 previously unknown zero-days exposed by Mythos. That's the good news.