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.

Financial services institutions have been facing pressure to modernize their operations for years. But legacy architecture and processes—along with compliance regulations—have made rapid innovation difficult to achieve. Adding to this pressure are new, digital-first competitors who accelerate the need for financial services to deliver better digital customer experiences both more consistently and at scale.

Event and alert filtering matters because alert fatigue is one of the most crucial issues in alerting and alert management. SIGNL4 implements a lightweight and effective way of filtering events. The overall process is based on alert categories. Alert categories are applied using a keyword search across the entire payload of incoming third-party events. But assigning alert categories, e.g. for alert augmentation, is not filtering.

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.

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.

Software development pipelines typically cycle through key four processes—design, development, testing and software or update releases. Traditional pipelines perform quality and security tests only after completing the development phase. Since there is no such thing as a perfect code, there are always issues to fix. However, if significant architectural changes are needed, fixing them at the end of the process can be highly expensive.

As your organization’s reliability needs grow, you may consider investing in SRE tools. Tooling can make many processes more efficient, consistent, and repeatable. When you decide to invest in tooling, one of the major decisions is how you’ll source your tools. Will you buy an out-of-the-box tool, build one in-house, or work with an open source project? This is a big decision. Switching methods half-way through adoption is costly and can cause thrash.

Background We recently released the biggest overhaul to one of the core features of Spike.sh - On-call schedules. Software teams use on-call schedules to designate first responders who will handle issues when they occur.

Unplanned work is rising, with consequences ranging from unhappy customers and lost revenue, to employee churn and burnout. So what is the true business cost of wasted time? In this blog, we will explore how one employee’s wasted time can impact the whole company—from operations, to development and beyond.

Blameless is excited to announce an enhancement to our Incident Retrospective tool! The Export feature now allows for customizable retrospectives.