Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in software development is often what we strive for when proving a case for improvement or product. With the movement toward the cloud infrastructure, we should start striving for a Minimum Viable Cloud (MVC). An MVC consists of everything needed to get a cloud environment up and running. The main services of cloud infrastructure are Communication, Application, and Storage.

In February, we wrote about how major live sporting events in March will impact online ordering and food delivery. We discussed the associated importance of monitoring your web app to ensure a smooth end-user experience and to troubleshoot issues like downtime, slow load times, and broken transaction flows. But unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know what happened. All the sports were cancelled. That’s right, no broadcasted games. No championships. No brackets.

If you’ve been building or supporting applications for a while, you’ve probably experienced the uncomfortable postmortem meetings that inevitably follow significant service interruptions. You know how it works. There was a critical outage in one of your apps and it took the team an entire week to track down and fix the issue. Customers and revenue were lost. Now you’re sitting in a large conference room with executives to discuss what happened and why.

When building Icinga DB Web we completely rewrote the basic Icinga Web UI. The “monitoring module”, which it was called before. While this existed for some time and the and the underlying concepts were already used in the Icinga Director, we took the chance and brought our Web UI to a new level. In Icinga IPL every UI element is represented by a PHP class.

One of the biggest impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic has been the number of employees asked or required to work from home. Whilst the capability to work completely remotely has been available for many years now, some companies have been reticent to take advantage of this due to the managerial and technical difficulties involved in managing remote teams and networks.

We are pleased to announce the general availability of version 7.7 of the Elastic Stack. Like most Elastic Stack releases, 7.7 packs quite a punch. But more than the new features, we’re most proud of the team that delivered it. A feature-packed release like this is special during normal times. But it’s extra special today given the uncertain times we are in right now.

San Jose, CA, May 13, 2020 – Virtana, the leader in enterprise hybrid cloud migration and optimization, announced today a new $15 million investment from HighBar Partners and Benhamou Global Ventures. The funding will allow Virtana to help more customers optimize performance, cost, and capacity in on-premises and cloud data centers.

One of the central questions we ponder in our work is: what does uptime mean in an interconnected world? You can do everything to ensure 100% reliability, yet still fail. How is this possible in an interconnected world? Shouldn’t there be enough redundancy to ensure nothing breaks if you don’t actively break it? That’s another way of saying technology is great when it works.