We’re excited to share that we are celebrating our tenth podcast episode! For this episode, we invited Russell Foster. As a DevOps engineer at StackState, Russell is responsible for making sure our SaaS product runs smoothly on AWS. Over the years, Russell has worked at both startups and more mature companies, where his responsibilities ranged from keeping things up and running in cloud environments to making sure hybrid and on-premise environments remain stable and reliable.

What kind of questions do you ask when you look at infrastructure monitoring tools? You probably start with some of the more important ones: All of the above are good questions and definitely should be asked. After all, if you acquire a solution that only monitors half of your network devices, has an incredibly complicated and difficult to use UI or doesn’t move you from reactive to proactive, the benefits are limited.

Ning Ge and Keith Miracle co-wrote this post. Amidst many social and economic disruptions that have arisen in the last few years, enterprises have been forced to quicken the pace of their digital transformation initiatives, adding and consuming cloud-based capacity and capability just to stay competitive, relevant, and, for some, in business.

Remember when Slack went down in early January? The three-hour outage, set off by AWS capacity issues, cost the company an untold amount of money. And the effects rippled across the enterprise. The outage devalued the company’s stock and seemed to send all 142,000 of its customers to Twitter to gripe. This high-profile outage is just the most recent of many outages highlighting the critical nature of continuous availability. And there’s only one answer to the problem.

The most basic component of automated software development is a CI/CD pipeline. While the term "pipeline" has been used to describe a wide range of computer science concepts, we use it at CircleCI and throughout the DevOps industry to refer to the vast range of behaviors and activities that are involved in continuous integration (CI).

Life before containerization was a sore spot for developers. The satisfaction of writing code was constantly overshadowed by the frustration of attempting to force code into production. For many, deployments meant hours of reconfiguring libraries and dependencies for each environment. It was a tedious process prone to error, and it led to a lot of rework. Today, developers can deploy code using new technology such as cloud computing, containers, and container orchestration.

Knowing only how much you spent on your AWS bill each month isn’t enough to provide the cost visibility you need to make cost-aware engineering and business decisions. It's why AWS introduced tags. Tags enable AWS users to label their resources to track cost and usage in the vast AWS infrastructure. The goal of tagging is to help you understand who, what, and why your cloud spend is changing.

Liesse Jones: Today we're joined by Anna-Marie Gutierrez-Lee, affectionately known as AMG, who's the Director of Talent Acquisition at LogDNA. She's passionate about mentoring recruiting teams and connecting talent to their dream careers, while fostering a genuine and positive candidate experience. Today, we're going to talk about how to recruit for a DevOps culture and why it's so important to bring more underrepresented talent into tech.