If your platform/DevOps team feels like a ticket queue, you’re paying the most expensive tax in engineering: toil. Toil is the work that keeps production moving today but quietly prevents you from building systems that keep production stable tomorrow. This article explains what toil is, how to measure
Configuration drift is what happens when your actual cloud diverges from what your Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, OpenTofu, Pulumi, CloudFormation) says it should be. If you think you “don’t really have drift,” the more likely truth is: you don’t measure it consistently, or you detect it but don’t close
“IaC-first” is the story most teams tell. ClickOps is the reality most teams live. In 100+ conversations with Heads of DevOps and Platform this year, I keep hearing the same line: “We don’t really have drift.” But the best data we do have points the other way. Datadog’s
Most engineering teams start their cloud journey with ClickOps. It’s intuitive: you log in to the console, spin up a VM, add storage, configure a service - all in a few clicks. ClickOps feels simple at first, but over time it creates real problems: * No single source of truth
According to Firefly, 89% of engineering teams claim to use Infrastructure as Code (IaC). But only 6% actually manage 100% of their infrastructure in code. That gap should make every DevOps, platform, and cloud security leader pause. It means the vast majority of companies are operating in “partial IaC” mode:
As AI becomes embedded into more DevOps workflows, a new challenge is surfacing — one most teams aren’t yet addressing: can you trust the code your AI generates? For frontend or application code, “close enough” might be fine. But in cloud infrastructure, a misconfigured IAM policy, a drift-inducing Terraform fix,
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has been a game-changer for cloud scalability. But it also creates a paradox: the more automated our provisioning gets, the easier it is to bake in security flaws that go undetected — until it’s too late. In 2025, every company running Terraform (or similar tools) must
Let’s face it: compliance tools are great at telling you what’s wrong. They flood your dashboard with misconfigurations, policy violations, and checklist gaps. But when it comes to actually fixing those issues — you’re on your own. And if you’re a VP of Engineering, Head of Platform,
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is now the baseline for engineering teams operating in the cloud. The ability to version, review, and automate infrastructure with tools like Terraform is no longer a competitive edge—it's a necessity. But most teams stop at automation and miss the point entirely. IaC