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.

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 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.

There’s no question that engineering teams at innovative tech companies are busy. No matter how successful your company is, there’s always a long backlog of feature enhancements that can make it challenging to focus on other priorities. So, it’s no surprise that one of the most common questions we get from companies that engage with us is “How much of an effort will this be for my engineering team?” The short answer is that you can get value within minutes.

We are seeing organizations struggle to deploy and manage their Kubernetes clusters due to the increasing level of oversight required and the current lack of attention during the planning phase. Day 2 operations can be a “sink or swim” time for these organizations. Without effective Day 2 operations, organizations will face challenges scaling their IT environment and will not be ready to handle new threats to security and availability.

The terms “workload” and “application” are sometimes thrown around interchangeably, but they are not the same, and it’s important to understand the difference.

Azure Service Health continuously notifies you of issues that may affect the availability of your environment, such as service incidents, planned maintenance periods, or regional outages. We’ve recently enhanced our Azure integration to include additional support for monitoring Service Health issues, enabling you to keep tabs on the health of your Azure environment and take proactive measures to mitigate downtime.

Blameless recently had the privilege of hosting SRE leaders Kurt Andersen, SRE Architect at Blameless, Vanessa Yiu, Executive Director, Enterprise Architecture at Goldman Sachs, and Tony Hansmann, Former Global CTO at Pivotal Software, Inc.

AWS is one of the primary providers for services that help users deploy and manage their containerized applications on the cloud. Since launching ECS in 2014 and EKS in 2017, AWS has learned a lot about running containers at scale and in production. AWS developed Bottlerocket OS, a new operating system for hosting containers. This OS was specifically designed to address gaps left by the ECS and EKS-optimized AMIs, which are based on operating systems that run traditional software applications.