Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Read a blow-by-blow analysis of two of the heavyweights in world of DevOps: when should you bet on Terraform, and what calls for Kubernetes?

One more blog topic stemming from our weekly office hours that we hold with the field team here at Shipa. In our last office hours, was asked a question about “what are the difference between DevOps Engineers and SREs?”. Both professions are emerging disciplines and cultures that continue to evolve and play an importance in technology organizations. I’ve been fortunate to have written and spoken about this before; though taking a fresh look at what the two domains try to accomplish.

To supervise the behavior of distributed applications and track the origin of service failures and downtime, developers often use traditional monitoring technologies and tools. However, this approach can fall short in its ability to measure the overall health of modern cloud-native architectures, which can span multiple hosting environments and encompass hundreds of microservices.

In a perfect world, your Configuration Management Database (CMDB) acts as the single source of truth for all your IT device inventory and the relationships between those devices. However, maintaining accuracy is easier said than done. That’s because the traditional method for provisioning and maintaining a CMDB is complex, unwieldy, and outdated the second it's updated. To keep up with the needs of a modern CMDB, an automated discovery and dependency mapping (DDM) solution is a must.

Microservices architecture allows technology companies to build application services around business capabilities. It enables rapid development and also boosts developer productivity. But it also introduces complexity. Troubleshooting and operating an internet-scale application based on microservices is hard. And that’s where distributed tracing comes into the picture. Traditional monolithic application architecture is easy to develop, deploy and monitor.