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Tech

Inside Crowdstrike's Deployment Process

On July 19th, Crowdstrike created the biggest outage in history. Find out the what the deployment process looked like that made this possible.

Dylan Ratcliffe
July 30, 2024
announcement
Announcing Overmind's Integration with HashiCorp Terraform Enterprise

Today, we're excited to introduce Overmind's integration with HashiCorp HCP Terraform & Terraform Enterprise. This integration allows users to automate risk detection and dependency mapping directly within their Terraform pipelines.

James Lane
August 22, 2024
Tech
CrowdStrike Root Cause Analysis: Have they done enough?

Crowdstrike have released the Root Cause Analysis for their massive July 19th outage, but does it go far enough?

Dylan Ratcliffe
August 7, 2024
playground
How to see if you're affected by the DigiCert revocation incident

Instructions to check if you're going to be affected by the DigiCert Revocation Incident

Dylan Ratcliffe
July 31, 2024
Tech
Inside Crowdstrike's Deployment Process

On July 19th, Crowdstrike created the biggest outage in history. Find out the what the deployment process looked like that made this possible.

Dylan Ratcliffe
July 30, 2024
Productivity
Why Our Startup Runs on Discord and the Channels That Make It Work

Communication tools can make or break a startup, especially one like ours where the team are fully remote spread across Europe. For our startup Overmind, we chose Discord as our primary platform for communication, collaboration, and workflow management.

James Lane
July 11, 2024
Terraform
5 Terraform Tools You Should Know About in 2024

As infrastructure becomes more complex, the variety and quality of tools available to manage it has been growing. In 2024, we have an unprecedented selection of high-quality tools to enhance our Terraform workflows. These tools help you efficiently handle complex deployments while minimising cost and risk. In this blog, we will explore a few of these tools, what they do, and how they can fit into your workflow.

James Lane
July 1, 2024
Tech
The State of Terraform (mini) Report

After surveying a number of companies that use Terraform, we correlate Terraform challenges and practices with the DORA DevOps metrics.

Dylan Ratcliffe
June 28, 2024
Productivity
How DORA Metrics Improve Talent Retention, Enhance Employee Well-being and Boost Reliability

Discover how prioritizing reliability with DORA metrics can reduce burnout, improve morale, and boost organizational performance. Learn practical strategies for DevOps leaders to enhance team well-being and minimize change failures from the 2023 State of DevOps Report.

Rob Finn
May 23, 2024
playground
We analysed 4 popular websites - here's what we discovered

Have you ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes of your favourite websites? How do they deliver their content, protect their data, handle traffic spikes and collect analytics? In this blog post, we set out with a simple goal: to check out how different kinds of websites are set up and what kind of data they collect from us.

James Lane
January 26, 2024
announcement
Automatically Discover Risks With Overmind and GitHub Actions

You can know know about potential risks BEFORE you even deploy with Overmind. This example uses Terraform, AWS, and GitHub actions however you can use this in whatever CI/CD tool you use!

Tyler Bird
January 16, 2024
announcement
Overmind Introduces Terraform Plan Support

Discover the latest Overmind update: Terraform Plan support! Assess and manage infrastructure changes with the updated plan support and blast radius for smarter, safer deployments.

James Lane
January 15, 2024
aws
Are you about to be paying for unused IPv4 addresses in AWS?

Effective from February 1, 2024, AWS will charge $0.005 per hour for each dedicated public IPv4 address. How does this cost effect AWS users and what can they do to minimise impact.

James Lane
November 22, 2023
Tech
The changelog that could have saved Reddit 314 min of downtime on Pi day

How a missed changelog caused a 314 minute outage on Pi Day. As usual there’s a bit more than meets the eye, so let’s dive in!

Dylan Ratcliffe
November 2, 2023
Tech
How to change a ClusterRole (without breaking the cluster)

In Kubernetes, a ClusterRole and a Role define authorization rules to access Kubernetes resources either on a cluster level (ClusterRole) or on a particular namespace (Role).

Dylan Ratcliffe
October 13, 2023
Deployment
Why is it always deploys to prod that go wrong?

If deploying to development is a closed-door rehearsal. Then deploying to production is a live performance on opening night. With all the unpredictability that goes with it, anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Let's explore the reasons why and what are the most effective solutions.

James Lane
September 27, 2023
aws
Loom’s nightmare AWS outage and how it might have been prevented

A Terraform change by Loom on 24th February meandered its way into production via the dev, test, and staging environments. Causing a system-wide issue affecting countless users. Could this have been prevented?

Dylan Ratcliffe
September 14, 2023
aws
Guide to configuring AWS SSO with Terraform

If you’ve had to configure AWS SSO for authenticating terraform then you know the set up can be a pain. This is due to terraform not working with the new AWS config format. Here are two ways to get it working.

James Lane
September 11, 2023
aws
Why you can't use Chatgpt to tell you if your next Terraform or AWS change will break something

When deploying to production you need to know the impact of your changes. Could AI & LLM tools combined with Overmind be used to give you that much needed context?

James Lane
September 5, 2023
aws
Confidently Automating AWS Infrastructure Changes

IaC tools like Terraform or Cloud Formation allow us to make out environments more consistent but does not necessarily make changes to prod less error prone.

James Lane
August 29, 2023
Tech
Is Observability relevant for Terraform?

Metrics, traces and logs don't make much sense when we're looking at Terraform. So what does?

Dylan Ratcliffe
August 14, 2023
Tech
Of course monolith infrastructure is cheaper than serverless

In recent years, teams have been buzzing about microservices, with many organisations jumping on the bandwagon. What we are seeing is a realisation that the complexity of Kubernetes has a cost. A cost that is not always beneficial unless running at a larger, more complex scale or team topology. This is why some teams are now making a reversal, returning to the monolithic architecture they once left behind.

James Lane
August 9, 2023
aws
The Story Behind that Backpack from AWS Summit London 2023

We had a awesome day walking around AWS Summit meeting lots of you! The backpack proved a great conversation starter and we loved seeing all the responses to it.

James Lane
June 7, 2023
Overmind
What’s the difference between Terraform Plan and Overmind Blast Radius?

Blast radius is not another Terraform plan visualisation tool. While TF plan can compare your current state with your desired state it doesn't provide the wider context of how these changes impact your application / infrastructure.

James Lane
May 31, 2023
Overmind
Preventing Outages: Limitations of Even the Best Observability and Monitoring Tools

Why a printer revealed the limitations of observability and monitoring tools

Dylan Ratcliffe
May 25, 2023
announcement
Join Our Design Partner Program - Calling All Innovators!

Join our Design Partner Program at Overmind and be part of a community of innovators shaping the future of AWS application changes. Share your impact analysis goals with the Overmind team and register now!

James Lane
May 16, 2023
aws
The Hidden Complexity in Your Cloud Architecture Diagrams

AWS diagrams are useful for providing high-level overviews of an application. However, hidden complexities could make it difficult to make changes based on these diagrams alone. There could be other resources that are connected to the one being changed.

James Lane
May 10, 2023
aws
Confidently working with IAM Roles in AWS

IAM roles With more than 400 million operations per second AWS IAM usage is on a scale that is often hard to comprehend. Combine that with AWS still maintaining its majority share of the cloud market, it's fair to say a good chunk of the internet is powered by IAM roles.

James Lane
April 28, 2023
Overmind
[Explained] Important Information about NAT Gateway in AWS

Like us, you may have received a rather confusing email from AWS titled 'Important information about NAT gateway in your account'.

Dylan Ratcliffe
March 15, 2023
aws
Datadog Outage: Multi cloud != reliability

Datadog Outage: Multi cloud != reliability

Dylan Ratcliffe
March 9, 2023
Overmind
Break the cycle of poorly maintained infrastructure diagrams

Diagrams can tell a story that is often complex and hard to understand by viewing consoles or CLI's. But for many developers and engineers they are often an afterthought.

James Lane
February 21, 2023
Overmind
Confidently managing AWS security groups

You want to make some changes to your AWS security groups but unsure of what do you do next? A good first place to start is to understand its associated resources.

James Lane
February 14, 2023
announcement
Announcing the Launch of Early Access

We are excited to announce the launch of early access. We will be focusing on our AWS source which is designed to give you visibility and insight into your AWS systems, applications, and infrastructure. So before making a change you can quickly uncover potential impact avoiding business critical misconfigurations.

Dylan Ratcliffe
February 2, 2023
Overmind
Unknown unknowns and how to know them

Accepting that there are things we don’t know we don’t know is the first step to solving really painful outages

Dylan Ratcliffe
December 2, 2022
Tech
Postgres Autovacuum Performance Tuning

Postgres Autovacuum Performance Tuning

Dylan Ratcliffe
July 29, 2022
Tech
Multi-Container Development Environments

Multi-Container Development Environments

Dylan Ratcliffe
July 14, 2022
Productivity
Empty Inbox - Full Calendar: My Productivity Workflow

Dylan explains his productivity workflow that keeps his inbox empty, calendar full, and stress levels low.

Dylan Ratcliffe
May 10, 2022
Overmind
The Overmind Story

A few years ago when I was consulting in London, we’d just finished implementing some automation and were planning to roll out a big change on a Friday afternoon to show it off.

Dylan Ratcliffe
March 31, 2022
TFLint vs Overmind: Choosing the Right Tool for Your Terraform Workflow

James Lane
July 18, 2024
What’s the difference between Rover and Overmind?

Rover and Overmind can both be used to visualise your Terrform plan output but how do they compare? In this article we will compare the two and see which is better when trying to understand the impact of your changes.

James Lane
February 16, 2024
What’s the difference between Terraform Graph and Overmind?

Terraform Graph and Overmind can both be used to visualise your Terrform plan output but how do they compare?

James Lane
July 17, 2024
What’s the difference between Atlantis and Overmind?

Atlantis is an excellent application for managing smaller-scale operations and infrastructure topologies with its main focus being on simplifying tasks via pull requests. As part of the workflow you receive a formatted plan output like the one below.

James Lane
February 16, 2024
What’s the difference between Driftctl and Overmind?

In the context of Terraform, drift represents discrepancies between your actual cloud setup and your IaC design. This typically results from changes that aren't tracked post-deployment. As companies grow, manual adjustments in cloud providers such as AWS can cause this gap to widen further.

James Lane
February 16, 2024
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