When you’re working towards SMART goals, you’ve got to be able to measure the impact your efforts are having. In fact, that’s what the M in SMART goals stands for. In Agile teams and DevOps, measuring performance is critical to quantifying the impact of your team’s work. And, without measuring how things are today, it will be impossible to know whether all our hard work will actually make any difference in the future.
In the daily life of a Site Reliability Engineer, the main goal is to reduce all the work we call toil. But what is toil? Toil is the kind of work tied to running a production service that tends to be manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical, devoid of enduring value, and scales linearly as a service grows. This blog post describes our journey to automate our nodes rotation process when we have a new AMI release and the open source tools we built on this.
Ah, the good old days! As a leader that benefits from technology, you remember the days of: Oh, wait! Good old days? What am I thinking? Those days were terrible! Then COVID19 hit and, miraculously, our IT department was regarded as heroes as they moved us online within a couple of weeks. Further, their interest in helping us utilize technology to improve the way we worked was outstanding, keeping us competitive, compliant and sustainable. What changed?
The value of Mattermost is significantly enhanced with third-party tool integrations and customization. Today, we are releasing the developer preview of a new Apps Framework for creating application integrations and customized workflows. The Apps Framework complements the existing ecosystem of plugins and allows apps to be written in any language and deployed with serverless hosting.
The idea behind Incident Management is to be ready. Not ready for anything, as that can be an unrealistic expectation, but ready to respond when the unexpected inevitably happens. DevOps teams often create incident playbooks in order to ensure they are as ready as possible to handle situations as they arise. Luckily, there is some amazing documentation on how to do just that from our friends at PagerDuty.
