Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

We live in a world that becomes more connected with each passing day. Public cloud hosts like Amazon Web Services (AWS) provide platforms with a wide array of capabilities that quickly scale based on demand. As a result, we’ve seen an explosion of new applications and services that continue to change our daily lives for the better. Data is a critical component of all of these systems. They can ingest vast amounts of data, process or transform it, and then pass it on.

The growth of site reliability engineering (SRE) has demonstrated the need for SRE implementations is here to stay for the foreseeable future. LinkedIn voted SRE jobs as the second most promising positions in the US in 2019, and now as we head into 2022, you can be sure to see the evolution of SRE continue to grow and expand. Below, we’ll get into what SRE is, what SRE engineers do, and how SRE will continue to evolve into the future.

As a DevOps, SecOps, or IT operations manager, you're surrounded by all the technology for the systems running the entire organization. This means legacy infrastructure, multi-cloud environments, services, tools, and applications. All of these components generate data—a huge amount of data—some of which you need to leverage for full-stack observability to ensure those systems supporting the business are running efficiently.

Spot worker nodes on EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) are a great way to save costs by allowing customers to take advantage of unused capacity. With Sumo Logic, we have experimented with and adopted spot worker nodes for some of our EKS clusters to see if we can pass along the same benefits. We decided to share some of the learnings, challenges, and caveats with using spot instances along with the monitoring setup.

Delivering value to customers quickly and efficiently is critical to the success of modern businesses. Understanding the process and timeframe during which an organization generates new ideas and then designs, develops and deploys them is vital to success. At the recent Illuminate User Conference, Drew Horn, Director of Business Development, held a discussion with Clara Ko, Director of Engineering at Sauce Labs, and Bryan Veselka, Director and Product Owner for Cloud and Automation at Vizient.

We are living in a data world. Data describes and controls almost every aspect of our life, from the president's elections to everyday grocery shopping. Data grows exponentially and so does the complexity of applications that manage that data. We all know the recent shift to microservices and other revolutionary changes that happened in the way we design, develop, deploy and operate modern applications.

Over the past decade, the software development landscape has shifted dramatically. Long development cycles resulting in big releases are now a thing of the past. Instead, the focus is on delivering value to the customer quickly and efficiently through small releases delivered at a high frequency. This shift is not without its challenges. Increased release velocity means an increased threat to security and reliability. To combat this, teams must collaborate fluidly across the organization.

Consumers and users of applications expect near 100% availability and reliability to work, transact, collaborate, etc. There’s a lot of talk about monitoring the performance of the application itself, but what about the underlying systems and components supporting the app, and in particular the infrastructure it sits on? If any piece of this stack fails, it can negatively impact the user experience, and in turn, your business.