I started Blue Matador in 2016 to help people like me. Site reliability engineers' and devops engineers' time is in short supply while the demands keep growing. We support an increasing number of applications, microservices, tools, libraries, languages, runtimes, pipelines, analytics and BI suites, and more. At the same time we’re supporting more applications, the applications themselves are growing more and more complex both from a deployment and a management angle. The developers and business needs we support rarely care about a unifying set of standards, they just care about the functionality of the app needing support.
This is why we always find ourselves fighting fires in production. The increased complexity never ends, and we pay the price in our sanity, personal time, and technical debt.
Blue Matador is doing great things in the automation of alerts, thresholds, and reliability space. We build a no-config tool that plugs in to AWS, Kubernetes, and servers using IAM credentials, a daemonset, and an agent. With literally zero configuration, we regulate thresholds, detect configuration problems, find expiring resources, and notify you based on anomalies. We’ve demonstrated that SREs and DevOps can get ahead of the fire-fighting curve and get back to managing their infrastructures, pipelines, and applications.
Today, I’m taking my vision one step further.
Announcing… Guardian DevOps
Guardian DevOps is my way of providing expert resources and help to the community to solve your individual problems. Guardian DevOps is a free service that puts you in contact with DevOps and SRE experts to solve your infrastructure, automation, and monitoring problems.
Anybody who is banging their head on a wall to solve an SRE/DevOps problem can tag us in a post on Twitter @GuardianDevOps. We’ll respond in real time and offer a screenshare where we can troubleshoot, reproduce, debug, and throw ideas off of each other. We’ll work with you until a solution is reached, no matter how long it takes — we recognize some problems suck, and it’s helpful to have multiple heads to solve them. After the solution is verified, we’ll write it up and share it on the internet to make sure nobody goes through that pain again.
The problems can be anything from setting up cloud providers to troubleshooting a bash script and everything in between. We’ll even look at application-specific issues, because, while they are specific to your company, they often have lessons that can be generalized and added to our compendium of troubleshooting knowledge.
You’ll also see us on various blogs, forums, and slack channels promoting this free service. We’re trying to help as many people as we possibly can.
Want to learn more about Guardian DevOps? Read more about it on our GuardianDevOps page.
