This is the first in a three-post series themed around Ops-led DevOps, where I’ll explore the relationship between observability and a set of software delivery lifecycle practices that support the adoption of DevOps practices and the transition from project to product-centric ways of working. I’ll start with Site Reliability Engineering, move onto Value Stream Management and finish with Continuous Delivery.

Are you looking to get up to speed on SRE fundamentals with the best SRE books and best DevOps books? Or are you hoping to expand your SRE knowledge into new domains? Either way, we’ve got you covered in our list of essential SRE resources!

Your payment systems have slowed to a crawl, customers are getting impatient and abandoning their shopping carts both online and in stores, and you’re losing money every minute this problem goes on. Behind the scenes, technical responders are scrambling to resolve the issue before it impacts more customers—and before even more money is lost.

More and more companies move business critical communication instruments into a cloud based environment. This could be established in a partner datacenter or in a public cloud environment. The main deciding factors between these two options are the trust to the provider and the costs of the solution.

Blameless CEO Ashar Rizqi recently had the pleasure of interviewing Dustin Pearce in a virtual executive fireside chat and AMA. Dustin is an experienced leader in scaling hyper-growth, cloud-native companies, as the VP of Infrastructure at Instacart and having previously served as Head of Service Engineering at Slack.

With the extreme changes we’ve all been through these last several months, it should come as no surprise that our jobs have changed drastically, too. We’re working remotely. We’re dealing with increased resource constraints. Our services are receiving more traffic than usual, and we’re tasked with keeping things up and running. Our work-as-done may not match what we did at the beginning of 2020.

How many servers can be managed by one system administrator? This question is pretty hard to answer since it depends decisively on the tasks that need to be operated. It is clear, however, that the amount of servers one engineer can manage has increased tremendously over the time, and is still growing. Public and private clouds, in combination with automation tools, enables us to automate many daily tasks. In a modern IT infrastructure almost everything can, and should, be automated.

Nagios is one of the most widely used open-source network monitoring software used by thousands of NOC teams globally to monitor the health of a vast array of their hosts and services. Most teams rely on Emails as their primary Nagios alert notification channel, which may take a few minutes to respond to by your NOC team.

Email alerting is an inefficient way to receive and address critical alerts. Email inboxes tend to get flooded with “clutter,” as irrelevant messages bury urgent incident notifications. Incident management procedures require incident management systems, ensuring that urgent issues are immediately addressed. Yet, some services are reluctant to say goodbye to email alerting and its inefficiencies. This is the case with Google Voice, which recently solidified its commitment to email alerting.

With decreased resources, increased stress and cognitive load, and social distancing policies, many teams are under extreme pressure. Without over-communication and special attention paid to organizational culture, teams can become fractured, anxious, or disillusioned.