During the past quarter, Lightrun has been busy at work producing a wealth of developer productivity tools and enhancements, aiming for greater troubleshooting of distributed workload applications and cost efficiency. Read more below the main new features as well as the key product enhancements that were released in Q1 of 2023!
Developers are increasingly drawn to Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS) offerings provided by major cloud providers such as AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, and GCP Cloud Functions. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has estimated that more than four million developers utilized FaaS offerings in 2020. Datadog has reported that over half of its customers have integrated FaaS products in cloud environments, indicating the growth and maturity of this ecosystem.
As organizations are adopting more of the FinOps foundation practices and trying to optimize their cloud-computing costs, engineering plays an imperative role in that maturity. Traditional troubleshooting of applications nowadays relies heavily on static logs and legacy telemetry that developers added either when first writing their applications, or whenever they run a troubleshooting session where they lack telemetry and need to add more logs in an ad-hoc fashion.
Effective troubleshooting and resolution of critical production issues require DevOps and R&D teams to utilize logging and observability. However, selecting the right logging solution can be challenging, given the wide range of available options and associated costs. Additionally, the strategy for logging usage should be tailored to the needs of different personas and use cases, such as DevOps engineers versus developers.
Open-source software is driving some of the most exciting innovations today. According to The Linux Foundation, open-source constitutes about 70 to 90% of all modern software solutions. But it isn’t all fun and games: open-source software is free, which brings about operational inefficiencies due to a lack of financial support for their developers. Platforms like Switch and SubStack started incentivizing paid subscription models to solve this problem.
Neglecting security is a rookie mistake. However, DevOps teams struggle to make it a priority in the quest to be continuously faster. Protecting your app from the ground up is challenging, so you need the right tools to improve your debugging process in development and production. To enhance security testing, developers can use SAST tools, which analyze program source code to identify security vulnerabilities, and DAST tools, which come up in later development phases in a running application.
With the growing adoption of remote and distributed application development including micro-services, cloud-native applications, serverless, and more, it is becoming challenging more than ever before for developers to troubleshoot issues within a reasonable time, and that is a bottleneck. That in a sense contradicts the objectives of Agile and DevOps through fast feedback loops, continuous delivery, quick MTTR (mean time to resolution of defects), etc.
The foundation of software development is rooted in the handling and preservation of data in compliance with the goals of the application. The core of any software program is the information stored in databases that is used for retrieval and manipulation. To ensure that the chosen database system (whether SQL or Non-SQL) is suitable for the needs of the application, it’s important to conduct tests to evaluate its capabilities.
Businesses around the world are increasingly turning to container technology to streamline the process of deploying and managing complex, cloud native applications. Containers bundle all necessary dependencies into a single package, offering portability, speed, security, scalability, and ease of management, making them the preferred choice over traditional virtual machines (VMs).
Git is a powerful version-controlling system designed to quickly and effectively manage any project. If you’re one of the 83 million developers who use Git, you’ve probably heard of Git HEAD before. When working with Git, you can check out only one branch at a time – the current or active branch. Git HEAD refers to the tip of this active branch. This article will teach you about Git HEAD and how to find and check its status.
