Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Vercel Ship 2026 made three things clear: Vercel wants your backend, agents now trigger most deployments, and Bring Your Own Cloud on AWS is GA. Here is what each announcement means for platform teams, what Vercel BYOC actually runs in your AWS account, and what it leaves on Vercel. Romaric founded Qovery to make Kubernetes accessible to every engineering team. He writes about platform strategy, developer experience, and the future of cloud infrastructure.

We just wrapped O11yDay London, and one theme ran through every session: writing code is no longer the hard part. Review queues, attention, operating agents in production, runaway token bills, and proving any of it is worth the money are where teams are getting stuck. The teams making progress are the ones who can see what's happening in production. Here are some highlights. We'll have videos available in the near future.

Last week we hosted our annual conference, EVOLVE, where global engineering leaders came to talk through the realities of building AI-native SDLCs. When asked to name the biggest friction point in their software lifecycle, attendees gave telling answers: ‘reviewing changes’ took 36 percent, ‘measuring impact’ took 35, and ‘building’ drew zero votes.

This week marks the end of our fourth Civo Navigate London event, and it feels like a good moment to say that this one had a slightly different energy from the ones before it. Over the past four years, we have hosted 10 Civo Navigate events across North America, India, and Europe, and each one has taught us something new about what this community actually wants from a day like this. London 2026 was no exception, and I think this year's lineup pushed that a little further than usual.

Black Hat USA 2026 brought more than 20,000 people to Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. We were there as a Platinum sponsor at booth 4208, and across two days on the business hall floor we had more than 750 conversations with security engineers and architects. Almost every one of them, whatever it started as, turned into a version of the same question: how do I know? How do I know whether a vendor's AI does what the banner says? How do I know what my agents are doing on the network?

Apple Declarative Device Management (DDM) is now the standard for device management across Apple platforms. As part of this transition, Apple is retiring legacy software update controls in iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS Golden Gate, watchOS 27, visionOS 27, tvOS 27 and later releases. This is just one of several platform changes arriving this fall that could impact how your team manages and secures Apple devices. The good news?

DASH 2026 brought thousands of engineers, builders, security professionals, and technology leaders to New York City for 2½ days focused on building, operating, and securing modern systems. Across hands-on sessions and more than 40 customer talks, teams shared how they’re tackling real-world challenges at scale with Datadog. On stage, the keynote set the direction for what’s next across observability, security, and AI, highlighting a shift toward more autonomous, AI-assisted operations.

At O11yCon, we talked to engineering teams across the industry, and the numbers are starting to get genuinely wild: Mixpanel DevOps Engineer Eddie Bracho told us their engineering team is generating 50% more PRs than before AI came into the mix (sorry). That kind of velocity is exciting, but it's also a pressure test for every part of your stack that isn't writing code, including your observability practice. Here's what we're hearing from customers about how that's playing out.

Across two AWS Summit events in London and New York City, we had the chance to speak with more than 1,000 engineers. They came from startups building their first production stack, and enterprises managing large AWS and multi-cloud deployments. The energy was exactly what you'd expect: major AWS launches, dozens of new service announcements, wall-to-wall cloud conversations. And HAProxy right in the middle of it.

Every year, MSP Summit unites some of the brightest minds in managed services. From tackling complex migrations that should have been straightforward to managing thousands of unique client environments, MSPs excel at adapting and rising to challenges, even as industry trends evolve. Even as industry trends evolve, though, one theme consistently comes up year after year: documentation.