From a technology perspective, at its core, observability is simply the ability to see, or monitor, what is going on inside an application. This is not new - Systems People have always needed to monitor things.

To understand it, we need to go back in time to the origins of monitoring.

Dive in as we explore the dawn of (computer) time, journey through the Dot-com Bubble through to its crash, and see where Systems Monitoring, Real User Monitoring and Application Performance Monitoring, and finally, Observability come into the fray.

It happens to the best of us - even the well-intentioned and disciplined teams. If there’s one thing about Bad Actors, they are persistent. What happens if one of them manages to find a way in?

Falco is a real-time security tool for monitoring containers and it is a last line of defence for your cloud infrastructure. We take a look at why your DevOps team should consider using it to help prevent Bad Actors from gaining access and disrupting your operations and business.

We are pleased to announce that stack.io is now a Kubernetes Certified Service Provider (KCSP).

Since 2014 when Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda introduced serverless architecture, serverless systems have gained traction amongst the tech community; they are now offered by all major cloud service providers, including Microsoft and Google. In serverless systems, computing resources are provisioned on-demand, using either back-end-as-a-service (BaaS) or function-as-a-service (FaaS) methodology. The name is a bit misleading because there are still servers in serverless environments; however, they’re essentially invisible to customers who don’t see, manage, or interact with them.

Uri Zaidenwerg, author of the article “Why DevOps Will Cease to Exist,” predicts the (lack thereof) future of DevOps by pointing out that many business services and aspects of application development are becoming automated, leading to DevOps jobs becoming obsolete. While he recognizes that a day will come where all companies will be required to understand and practice DevOps objectives, this understanding would enable companies to allow automation “to do its thing,” eliminating the need for DevOps engineers and teams.

Here at stack.io, we disagree.

DevOps is all about helping bring new software and applications to the market faster while ensuring the best value for the end-user. The collective success of implementing this model rests heavily on the people who are tasked with implementing it.

Now, hiring good people, in general, is hard; hiring good developers is harder; hiring good DevOps experts is the hardest. Why? For one, hiring for DevOps is more than filling one narrow role – to take on such a complex task for an organization requires great people. Read further to explore the complex role of a DevOps expert and several reasons why enterprises struggle to find the right people to satisfy their DevOps needs.

You’ve probably heard the term “best practices” thrown about before but what does it actually mean? If you asked three different people to define “best practices”, you’d get three different answers. Who’s making these “best practices”? Why are they “the best”? Are any of them actually worth following?

It's a new label for a tried and tested workflow. GitOps means performing all of your operations based on a single source of truth. Typically, this “single source of truth” is a git repository. Instead of allowing developers and sysadmins to make changes directly to your infrastructure, changes must first be made in git and then reviewed by other team members.

Virtually everything is online these days. As many businesses move towards a SaaS (“software-as-a-service") business model, the risk and potential consequences of “getting hacked” grow by the day. One major instance of this was the recent SolarWinds hack – a major US tech company essentially has had its flagship product used to compromise as many as 18,000 different companies and government agencies. How do you avoid this happening to your business?

Kubernetes is (still) the hip new thing: developers love it, DevOps types rant about how great it is, and everyone wants it on their resume. Sometimes it’s hard to separate out what it actually does from all the hype. Once you get past all the buzzwords, is there any tangible financial benefit for companies that use it? Is there a business case for switching over?

Learn more about the importance of having a second pair of eyes check over your code.

The COVID-19 pandemic will forever impact the way that our society operates. Although there were great periods of grief that for some still extend into the present, we as a society are slowly starting to adjust to the new normal. Part of this adjustment is figuring out how you’re going to reintegrate your organization back into society.

Your codebase likely has a lot of busy hands. Imagine if every single developer cloned the entire master branch and merged their changes without any testing: the quality and maintenance of code would be a disaster. This is where continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) come in. 

Clouds and cloud computing have become essential when it comes to IT infrastructures. Public clouds usually have tons of space available and they are often recommended when pursuing software development and other types of collaborative projects, like web app development.

Uptime is a critical component for any business that hosts a web application. To mitigate the cost of downtime, every business should have a tried-and-tested disaster recovery plan.

Traditional ops often meant that you needed at least one, if not many ops personnel, to build and maintain your infrastructure. But as DevOps culture grew, we eventually came to a point where some companies no longer needed an entire team of full-time DevOps personnel to achieve their infrastructure goals.

In 2019, we talked a lot about AWS, Kubernetes, and DevOps. Here are our top posts that YOU wanted to read!

Would containerizing your application save you time, money, or resources? Are there scenarios where VMs are better than containers? What about Kubernetes—do you have to use Kubernetes if you containerize? Get the answer to these questions and more in this complete guide to containers vs VMs for DevOps.

Has Kubernetes changed how DevOps works? We discuss what it’s like to do DevOps in a containerized, Kubernetes world.

AWS can become costly if your infrastructure isn’t optimized for the platform. We go through what we can do, recommendations we can make, and what you can do to save costs.

In a cloud-native society, a single source of truth helps ensure that customers experience the same results that you see during the development stage.

Through our experience setting up infrastructure and determining which tools to use in the cloud for our clients, here are 10 things to consider when choosing cloud tools.

DevOps help startups scale by enforcing 6 key processes: Continuous Monitoring, Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment, Automatic Data Backup, Continuous Security, and Continuous Improvements.