the effx blog

The evolution into DevOps and why it works today

Culturally, one of the most common themes for each organization was moving towards some form of a DevOps model. I also noticed that the majority of organizations I spoke to were on a slightly different journey or maturity level in terms of how they’d adopted or planned to adopt DevOps. A lot of where they were today was based on the roots of where they started off as an organization. For that reason, it’s important we know a little bit about the history of how we’ve made it to our cloud-native world as it is today.

Amir Kazemi

January 14, 2021

How organizational structure matters in the move to microservices

Moving to microservices isn’t always just a shift in technology. It should also be accompanied by a shift in how teams are formed and the way individuals work together. Oftentimes, some of that decentralization and autonomy of teams may already exist in a monolith which makes the transition to microservices even easier. Conway’s law says, “Any organization that designs a system will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.” 

Amir Kazemi

December 17, 2020

Incident response from monolith to microservices

Moving to a microservices architecture is a major change for any engineering organization. It impacts everything. From how teams collaborate and the tools they use, to the deployment of their system, and even how incidents are handled in production.

Mya Pitzeruse

December 10, 2020

My journey to SRE into 2020 and beyond

A curious quality of SREs is that academia didn’t prepare them for a role in this field. Instead, you find former software developers who found joy in preventing system outages. Others found downtime so reprehensible that they dedicate their careers to preventing it.

Eric Uriostigue

December 10, 2020

Introducing service standards: level setting production-readiness for every engineering team

At the outset of a company’s move to microservices, one of the first challenges teams will face is trying to ensure that all of its new services meet an engineering-wide, agreed upon set of standards before being promoted to production. This usually takes the form of a Production Readiness Checklist stored somewhere in a wiki or git repository, keeping microservices that aren’t operationally ready for live traffic from causing unnecessary reliability issues.

Joey Parsons

December 17, 2020

effx + gremlin: simpler, more confident chaos engineering

We’re excited to bring the benefits of chaos engineering into the effx platform with our new integration with Gremlin. As the leader in helping engineering organizations build resilient infrastructure, Gremlin provides a comprehensive way to run attacks against your services infrastructure so you can uncover critical failures before they impact customers.

Joey Parsons

December 17, 2020

Kubernetes 101: containers, components, and the basics

Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform that was originally developed by Google and released as a seed technology for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in 2015. It means ‘helmsman’ or ‘pilot’ in Greek and is written in programming language, Go.

Amir Kazemi

December 17, 2020

effx + Datadog: uplevel your incident response

Incident response is hard. Whether you’ve been on-call for more than a decade or only two months, the pressure of having the weight of your business on your shoulders during downtime is never easy. And in those critical moments — what separates good services from great services is the ability to recover from downtime without impacting your customers.

Joey Parsons

December 15, 2020

The simplest way to navigate and operate your microservices

The complexity and reliability of microservices are some of the biggest challenges that engineering teams continue to face. Having experienced the chaos first-hand while running site reliability at Airbnb, we started effx to help you tackle it with ease and prepare for the future.

Joey Parsons

December 10, 2020

How to onboard new engineers remotely

Getting the onboarding process right is crucial for both the new employee and the larger engineering team. It has ramifications for team members’ short-and-long-term productivity, job satisfaction and retention. But onboarding can also be tricky, even in an office setting.

William Li

December 17, 2020

What's different about all-remote incident response?

At first glance, incident response seems to be the one thing relatively unaffected by the transition to all-remote. Even in a small company, only around 20 to 30% of incidents are handled ‘in person,’ with a team of people all huddled around the same conference table.

William Li

December 17, 2020

Building an all-remote engineering team

While there have been a few all-remote tech companies for years, places like GitLab and Buffer that have been all-remote from the start are, in my experience, the exception, not the rule. In spite of the reputation engineering has for being a job that can be done from anywhere, nearly all my personal experience as an engineer — and that of my friends and colleagues — has been at butt-in-seat office jobs.

William Li

December 10, 2020

How to create a service catalogue

A comprehensive service catalogue is the only way organizations — especially at scale — can keep track of all of the services and how they depend on each other. As teams develop new services continually, in parallel, there has to be a way to keep track.

Joey Parsons

December 10, 2020

How to write a runbook

Updated run books with actionable, relevant information give individuals and teams a clear, application-specific roadmap for incident response as well as application-specific best practices for maintenance tasks.

William Li

December 10, 2020

Best practices for incident response

When things go wrong, money and reputation are on the line. Minutes matter. Incident response is stressful and high-stakes. Nonetheless, there is a right and a wrong way to go about incident response. Some organizations and some individuals seem to excel at incident response, and others struggle.

William Li

December 10, 2020

How to run a post-mortem

Every engineering organization should be continually striving to create more resilient applications and processes. Incidents are a reality in any organization, but effective post-mortems help improve the incident response process, resolve technical and organizational issues that cause incidents and build increasingly resilient applications.

William Li

December 10, 2020

How much visibility is enough?

During an incident, visibility into the system is the only way to approach debugging methodically. Without visibility, engineers who respond to an incident have nothing to rely on but tribal knowledge and gut instinct to find the cause of the problem and resolve it.

William Li

December 10, 2020

Why timelines matter during an incident

The first step during an incident is finding out what is broken — and how it broke. In most cases, there is a clear action that was taken that potentially caused the incident. Ideally, that action can be undone and the problem easily solved.

William Li

December 10, 2020

How to reduce cognitive load during an incident

At a previous job, I worked with a particularly effective incident manager. After working with him for a while, I learned that before going into software engineering he had been an air traffic controller with the Air Force — and he said that there are many similarities between managing incidents in an aircraft and managing software engineering incidents.

William Li

December 10, 2020

Getting new team members ready for on-call rotation

In an ideal scenario, a reasonably experienced engineer who is new to the team should become part of the on-call rotation as soon as he or she has a functioning company computer and credentials to access any systems needed to work on the code.

William Li

December 10, 2020

Why service catalogs matter at scale

If you live in a town of 150 people, there’s a pretty good chance that not only do you know the names of everyone who lives in the same town, but you also know how everyone is connected to each other.

Joey Parsons

December 17, 2020

Better timelines, better post-mortems

It’s two days after your trial-by-fire on-call rotation. Even with an outdated service catalog and an incomplete run book, you eventually fixed the problem that was preventing users in Europe from logging in.

William Li

December 10, 2020

Service-level visibility during an incident

It’s 5 a.m. on your first on-call rotation at a new company. You were hired quickly, when the organization’s most senior engineer retired to Costa Rica, changed her phone number and stopped responding to emails.

William Li

December 10, 2020

Why now's the time for a new (micro)service catalogue

One thing I’ve been asked frequently over the past few months is why do we at effx feel it’s important to introduce a new service catalogue? From an ITIL perspective, there’s plenty of tools that already exist.

Joey Parsons

December 10, 2020

Service ownership in a microservices world

When migrating to a service oriented architecture from the grasp of a monolith, there are plenty of technical considerations to make.

Joey Parsons

December 10, 2020

Kubernetes 101: containers, components, and the basics

Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform that was originally developed by Google and released as a seed technology for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in 2015. It means ‘helmsman’ or ‘pilot’ in Greek and is written in programming language, Go.

Amir Kazemi

December 10, 2020

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