When growing a business from a startup to a large enterprise, it’s software systems also expand in complexity, meaning that encountering incidents is inevitable. These incidents have indirect costs that can include loss of trust in the product or brand. However, incidents occurring are not necessarily a bad thing — it provides the business with new learning opportunities and the chance to improve its operational practices. But how do we learn from such a failure?

What is a postmortem?

An incident postmortem is a meeting that brings together all of the people that were involved, whether directly or indirectly, to discuss, document and derive…

Many businesses have a dedicated software engineering department, whether to maintain a website or develop apps. The majority of these departments will perform code reviews as part of their daily routine. But what’s the difference between a negative experience and a constructive review?

What is a code review?

A code review is a common practice in software engineering that aims to ensure the quality of an implementation is maintained by having the author’s work examined by one or more of their peers.

Where should you start with a code review?

Productive code reviews should always start with two elements: the ticket for the issue and any test files in the change request.

The…

The popular messaging service Slack recently experienced a global outage which impacted millions of users, the majority of which were individuals working from home or remote learning due to the Coronavirus pandemic. The outage lasted for an extended period, potentially impacting their service level agreements (SLAs), impacts the brand while coming hot on the heels of the announcement of their $27.7 billion acquisition by Salesforce. Outages like the one Slack experienced are increasingly common in a technology focused society, so how do we avoid costly issues like this?

What causes an outage?

An outage (also known as downtime) is a period of time when…

Business landscapes around the world are constantly evolving with every organisation clambering to innovate so that they can better react to the changing conditions in which they exist and uncover new opportunities to help them to drive their growth and profits. However, in a world where true innovation is scarce and many companies resort to rehashing old ideas, how do you foster an environment that truly cultivates ideation?

Why open-source?

Open-source software has seen its fair share of innovative languages, tools, frameworks, and products in recent years. Some notable examples include Docker, Kubernetes, Gatsby, React and Elasticsearch, not to mention numerous machine…

Firecracker is a Virtual Machine Monitor, written in Rust that Amazon Web Services use to power it’s Serverless Compute services — Lambda and Fargate. Firecracker makes use of Linux’s Kernel-based Virtual Machine virtualisation infrastructure to provide its products with MicroVMs.

What’s the Point?

The development of Firecracker was undertaken to meet several objectives. These were:

• To run thousands of functions (up to 8000) on a single machine with minimal wasted resources.
• To allow thousands of functions to run on the same hardware, protected against a variety of risks including security vulnerabilities, such as side-channel attacks like Spectre.
• To perform similarly to running natively…