DevOps

Downtime sucks (duh) - it means unhappy end users and engineers. Failures and error messages frustrate customers and interrupt engineers (or worse, wake them up).

Applications, products, and systems have become more and more complex. Microservices, dependencies, and external services provide greater functionality and improved reliability.

Event-driven architecture (EDA) is more scalable, responsive, and flexible than its synchronous counterpart. That’s because it processes and distributes information as it arrives instead of storing it for processing when a client requests it.

Embracing a microservice architecture typically also means deploying much more frequently, which can seem scary. But favoring many incremental deploys is actually a sound risk mitigation strategy since changes tend to be smaller and more isolated.

A service catalog is a valuable asset for any growing engineering organization delivering software at scale. But valuable assets aren’t created or earned easily. That’s why, at OpsLevel, we’re always thinking about ways to make building and maintaining an up-to-date service catalog simpler. Recently we upgraded our Discovered Services capabilities to do just that.

Let's explore Backstage, the problems it attempts to solve, and considerations to make before bringing it into your organization.

Over the last week, the team at OpsLevel completed its largest HackDay ever. OpsLevelers demoed 15 different projects, spanning everything from our infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines to our Applicant Tracking System and assets for acquiring and onboarding customers. Even our CEO carved out time to write some code–though he admitted his UI was lacking.

Today, Kubernetes is the de facto standard for container orchestration, running in approximately half of all containerized environments. Platform and infrastructure teams of all shapes and sizes are accustomed to operating Kubernetes in order to run their organizations’ microservices (and applications) at any scale.

Distributed microservice architectures are increasingly common today as engineering teams seek to scale both their applications and headcount. But for all the advantages of microservices, they’re not without tradeoffs. One area of concern is the web of dependencies that’s naturally created as more microservices are built and deployed.