Despite the great advancements in IT infrastructure consumption models that have been enabled by the cloud, the underlying network remains the last - and long awaited - piece of the digital transformation puzzle to fall into place. In this blog, we look at the key benefits for businesses adopting a Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) model.

At Speedscale, we are on the cutting edge of defining autonomous testing for the cloud era. However, we aren’t the only company trying to solve this problem and we enjoy learning from every perspective. That’s why Facebook’s recent blog article about autonomous testing caught my eye. They’ve built a sophisticated autonomous test system that introduces many of the same techniques we utilize.

Retrospectives are a well-established resource in the software and systems engineering toolbox. From sprint retros through to post-incident reviews, we look back on our work to learn from it and to get better. We can apply the same ideas to our professional practice with a personal retrospective: writing an analysis of our experiences to learn as much as possible. We could look over a whole year of work, or focus more closely on a particular project.

Managing technology isn't your only responsibility as a CTO. You could be the CIO, Digital Enabler, Data Officer, and Engineering Leader all rolled up into one, whether you work at a startup, scaleup, or enterprise. Your role as a C-suite executive for engineering requires you to research and implement the newest, most efficient technologies. As CTO, you’re responsible for: The list goes on and on. That's why you, of all people, need the right tools to manage your vital role in the digital world.

Cloud teams are busy. In fact, Virtana’s recently published State of Hybrid Cloud and FinOps survey found that 44% of respondents have deployed more than half of their workloads in a public cloud, and 88% have deployed more than one-quarter of their workloads in a public cloud. That’s a lot of migration, optimization, and management on the cloud team’s plate; and it’s not just for right now but for the foreseeable future.

The release of OpenStack Charms 21.10 brings native support for OpenStack Xena in Charmed OpenStack. This latest version of OpenStack comes with initial support for SmartNICs in Nova and further improvements around Neutron Open Virtual Network (OVN) driver integration. In order to further simplify the job of the cloud operations teams, the OpenStack Charms 21.10 release offers improved day-2 automation, including additional charm actions and better upgrade experience, and new operations documentation.

In the context of enterprise process automation, technology is used to automate operations, thus improving efficiency and achieving corporate objectives. Processes are defined as the actions and activities that bring your company closer to achieving a specific goal. By automating routine tasks using software solutions, you may save operational expenses while also decreasing the amount of time it takes to complete tasks.

Datadog CI Visibility provides a unified platform for monitoring your CI/CD pipelines. Now, we are partnering with CircleCI to extend that same critical visibility to your CircleCI environment. Datadog’s integration uses CircleCI webhooks to capture information about the status and performance of your workflows and associated jobs, such as a job’s duration and whether or not it failed or was canceled.

When you sign a contract, you expect both parties to hold their end of the bargain. The same can be true for testing applications. Contract testing is a way to make sure that services can communicate with each other and that the data shared between the services is consistent with a specified set of rules. In this post, I will guide you through using Joi as a library to create API contracts for services consuming an API.