Humans are funny. Ever meet them?
They’re weaklings that couldn’t even defend themselves from a gorilla. Yet they rule the world.
How? “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world” said one of them (bonus point if you remember who).
You’re #CuriousAboutData — so read on!
We compensate for our shortcomings with tools that we create. This is especially important in technology. We kind of created the problem of computers and now we have to find a way to solve it with … you guessed it …more computers.
Let’s say you have just one website with not a lot of traffic. You need a web server, an API backend, database, and file storage at the bare minimum. Most likely you have dozens of instances of each and other auxiliary servers. Suddenly, you have a torrent of event information from all these sources. Without some sort of a tool to manage it, you have to resign yourself to flying blind.
Yes, I know, people do it all the time, but don’t be those people!
As system complexity increases, the number of components keeps growing and tooling software becomes essential to business operations. This is not just limited to DevOps, but also things like OCR/computer vision tools, productivity automation, data exploration pipelines and more.
Consider, for example something so simple as synchronizing a SQL server based ERP with an online store. Online store is accessible via an API, and sends back information via webhooks. There are no more than a half a dozen steps in either direction, but they’re all crucial. Any error can result in failure to fulfil an order, or an inventory drift, etc.
Can the owner afford not to have visibility? Can they afford to have someone check logs on regular bases? No, and no! If they want to sell online, they have to automate their log processing and alerts. Not nice to have, not a maybe – a must. And this is a very small business. Think about a datacenter with hundreds of servers and complex workflows.
There are many tools and use cases for tools. We will be highlighting some creative automation and augmentation scenarios in the upcoming posts. Stay tuned…
We like people, so feel free to call or write. Humans only.
