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  • Managing Global CDN Operations at Netflix

    At the recent Strange Loop conference, Robert Fernandes, engineering manager at Netflix, who leads the Open Connect Tools team, gave a talk on how they manage operations for Netflix’s in-house OpenConnect content delivery network (CDN).

  • Addressing Multi-Cloud Automation, HashiCorp Releases Terraform Cloud

    In a recent blog post, HashiCorp announced the full release of Terraform Cloud, an open-source SaaS platform for teams to manage their infrastructure-as-code workflows. This orchestration takes place through cloud-agnostic tools that allow teams to improve their productivity through repeatable automation. This announcement follows their May 2019 announcement of Remote State Management.

  • Amazon Releases a Preview of the New AWS Tools for PowerShell

    In a recent blog post, Amazon announced it would release a preview of refactored AWS Tools for PowerShell, allowing developers and administrators to manage their AWS services from the PowerShell scripting environment.

  • Bringing Hybrid Automation to Serverless Computing, Microsoft Previews PowerShell in Azure Functions

    In a recent blog post, Microsoft announced PowerShell support in Azure Functions 2.x runtime, in preview. This release focuses on bringing custom logic scenarios to administrators and developers who prefer to script in PowerShell. Azure Function event triggers and bindings bring new capabilities to PowerShell scenarios by supporting on-demand execution in addition to schedule support.

  • Server and Network Operations Automation at Dropbox

    Dropbox's engineering team wrote about their network and server provisioning and validation automation tool called Pirlo. Pirlo has a pluggable architecture based on a MySQL backed custom job queue implementation.

  • The Human Side of Microservices

    A microservices architecture is a game changer for team communication, not a purely technical solution. If different teams don’t have stable, direct communication channels, the software they produce will suffer. The five key properties crucial for a successful microservices implementation are zero-configuration, auto-discovery, high redundancy, self-healing, and fault tolerance.

  • Intelligent Automation on Pace for Explosive Growth, But Organizational Challenges Prevalent

    In a recent KPMG study, the professional services organization published a report on the growth of Intelligent Automation. The report suggests that overall spend will reach $232 billion by 2025, compared to $12.4 billion which is spent today. But, this expected growth comes with many challenges, including tool maturity, skilled labor and organizational change management.

  • Scaling Network Automation at Facebook Using Zero-Touch Provisioning

    Facebook’s global network consists of both wide-area backbone networks and edge Points-of-Presence, which support end-user facing requests and internal traffic. To meet increased provisioning and maintenance demands, the network engineering team built Vending Machine - a workflow framework that utilizes Zero Touch Provisioning to perform any kind of configuration on network devices.

  • CA Announces New Release of Workload Automation Engine

    Automation vendor, CA, has released a new version of their workload engine, CA Workload Automation AE, including new usability and performance features  and direct integration with the CA Automic One Automation platform.

  • Chaos Engineering at Twilio

    The Twilio team describes their foray into Chaos Engineering where they use Gremlin to inject failures into their homegrown queuing system shards to test for automated recovery.

  • How Do We Automate Testing?

    Test automation will demand time and attention, but when done the right way, is worth the investment. Don’t overdo automation; instead, focus on the needs and requirements. Having clean and easy-to-read code is very important to keep your test suite maintainable.

  • How Facebook Achieves Rapid Release at Massive Scale

    A recent article about Facebook’s release process covers its flexible methodology of pushing massive amounts of code changes to production for web and native mobile apps. It focuses on how they moved from a “cherry-picking” to a “push-from-master” strategy over a period of one year and their tools and processes for achieving it.

  • Containers to Overtake VMs in Application Platform Space, Says SDxCentral Survey

    One of the key findings of the 2017 Container and Cloud Orchestration Report from SDXCentral is that container adoption has steadily increased in the last two years and is set to overtake virtual machines (VMs) in the application platform space. In 2016, only 8% of respondents had deployed containers while this year, 45% are already using it.

  • Amazon Adds Target Tracking Support for EC2 Auto Scaling

    Auto Scaling cloud resources is nothing new in AWS. However, Amazon recently announced a new Target Tracking policy that gives customers more granular control over how their application scales. Target Tracking policies allow an administrator to target a specific metric that will drive how and when the EC2 resources will scale.

  • How Testers Can Become More Technical

    Testers who are able to successfully apply technical techniques of the testing craft during testing are more valuable; they increase both the quality and productivity of their teams. To become more technical, testers can learn something about code, and they should know how to manipulate and parse text files and how to use the most important analysis tools for their application platform.

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