Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As I approach my first anniversary at Mattermost as a Senior Technical Writer, it’s fun to look back on what has been an empowering year of daily technical learning. When I joined Mattermost, I was new to many of the processes and tools used by the team: A year in, I’ve now introduced, led, and supported enhancements across all of these areas, and more! I’d like to introduce you to our product documentation tech stack and share some key learnings we’ve adopted.

Two popular deployment architectures exist in software: the out-of-favor monolithic architecture and the newly popular microservices architecture. Monolithic architectures were quite popular in the past, with almost all companies adopting them. As time went on, the drawbacks of these systems drove companies to rework entire systems to use microservices instead.

Modern customers demand that their applications are as seamless and error-free as possible. However, building such apps is a herculean task in itself. You need to constantly look out for incoming exceptions and warnings in your app in production. Effective error monitoring is key to resolving such issues before they are discovered by your users and cause a disruption in the quality of your services.

CRUD and REST are two of the most popular concepts in the Application Program Interface (API) industry. REST was made to standardize the HTTP protocol interface between clients and servers and is one of the widely used design styles for web API. On the other hand, CRUD is an acronym used to refer to the four basic operations executed on database applications. Because both work on manipulating databases’ data, it’s easy to see why people have some confusion between them.

Monitoring cloud-native systems is hard. You’ve got highly distributed apps spanning tens and hundreds of nodes, services and instances. You’ve got additional layers and dimensions—not just bare metal and OS, but also node, pod, namespace, deployment version, Kubernetes’ control plane and more. To make things more interesting, any typical system these days uses many third-party frameworks, whether open source or cloud services.

AWS CloudFormation is a service that enables you to create and provision AWS infrastructure deployments predictably and repeatedly. This helps you leverage AWS products such as EC2 instances, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon SNS, Elastic Load Balancing, and Auto Scaling to build highly reliable, highly scalable, cost-effective applications in the cloud – without worrying about creating and configuring the underlying AWS infrastructure.