For some developers, SemVer can look just cosmetic, nice to have, or simply useless. But SemVer format is mandatory to make reliable software. I'll explain how over one year, we encountered 2 issues related to SemVer. The first one was critical and led to a production outage, while the other was a lot of trouble for several companies to upgrade a managed service.

Many of the concepts SREs take for granted about incident management originated with efforts to fight fires in California in the 1970s.

There is huge scope required when building video games. They are not just computer programs; they’re audio-visual artistic works. It’s a collaborative effort between software engineers, animators, scriptwriters, graphic designers, photographers and sound engineers. Working with these collaborators and assets leads to a different software pipeline than the average software project.

Consul is a service networking platform from HashiCorp that helps you manage and secure communication between microservices. You can use Consul with Kubernetes, and it supports on-prem, hybrid, and multi-cloud architectures. Consul service mesh provides a control plane which allows you to automate the management of traffic between your services via features like service discovery, DNS, load balancing, and routing.

Most Apache Spark users overlook the choice of an S3 committer (a protocol used by Spark when writing output results to S3), because it is quite complex and documentation about it is scarce. This choice has a major impact on performance whenever you write data to S3. On average, a large portion of Spark jobs are spent writing to S3, so choosing the right S3 committer is important for AWS Spark users.

As companies move more applications into the cloud, and package them into containers, environments become more complex with limited visibility. While infrastructure is abstracted away as much of it is delivered by the hyperscalers, this creates an opaqueness that makes it hard to control costs and understand resource utilization. As a result, many companies are experiencing high cloud bills and lots of cloud waste.

For many years, system uptime was the primary measure of reliability, especially when the most popular method of running software was on bare metal, on-premises servers. If a server was shutdown, rebooted, or otherwise became unavailable, downtime was expected until a system administrator could manually restart it.

With hybrid work environments on the rise, enterprise networks are dealing with multiple remote connections, increasing the risk of breaches and other attacks. One way to mitigate these risks is by implementing Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) into the enterprise network. Unfortunately however this does not address the full set of threats to the enterprise, as many of the zero-trust service providers and on-premises network solutions do not address the voice network.

Moving large amounts of data to the cloud can be arduous and time-consuming. A cloud migration would take years if engineers manually moved data from assessment through mobilization and migration phases. An effective cloud migration also requires adequate data encryption, fast data transfer speeds, and constant monitoring. Migrating workloads to AWS requires you to monitor costs in real-time as well to avoid overspending.

Unlike traditional IT Ops, the role of the SRE isn’t simply focused on finding and solving technical problems. The big win for today’s SREs is supporting the organization’s strategic innovation initiatives. With the appropriate observability capabilities, it’s possible to quantify the value that software infrastructure contributes to this innovation effort.