Posts about incidents, engineering, and features
Read about our experiences in incident management, building scalable applications with React and Rails and running Kubernetes in production.
2021 is the Year of Reliability
There's no better time than now to dedicate effort to reliable software . Say…
By Robert Ross • 19 January, 2021
ThoughtsA look back at 2020
What a year 2020 was, needless to say, not the best. Looking on the brighter…
By The FireHydrant Team • 8 January, 2021
Culture4 Questions with Jeff Smith
This is the first in a series of interviews with experts about reliability…
By The FireHydrant Team • 17 December, 2020
InterviewsKubeCon North America 2020 Wrapup
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2020 Virtual (say that five times fast…
By Rich Burroughs • 24 November, 2020
ConferencesWhat is CI/CD?
The Importance of a CI/CD Pipeline in Incidence Response CI/CD is a software…
By Tori Crawford • 12 November, 2020
TechDevOpsMore New Terraform Resources - Episode 7 of Throughput Thursdays
In this episode we create resources for managing teams and severities through…
By Robert Ross • 29 October, 2020
TutorialVideoHashiConf Digital October 2020 Wrapup
HashiConf Digital October 2020 was the second HashiConf to be held online due to…
By Rich Burroughs • 27 October, 2020
ConferencesCreating a Data Source - Episode 6 of Throughput Thursdays
In this episode we update our Terraform resource for FireHydrant functionalities…
By Robert Ross • 22 October, 2020
TutorialVideoMoving from Redux Thunk to Redux-Saga: A walk-through
At FireHydrant, we recently began to replace our usage of thunks with Sagas to…
By Mandy Mak • 21 October, 2020
TechTutorialDastardly Disasters
Do you like spooky stories? Do you like spooky stories about incidents? If you…
By Rich Burroughs • 20 October, 2020
VideoIncident Ready: How to Chaos Engineer Your Incident Response Process
Don’t let a T-Rex ruin your process We’re pretty sure using a real incident to…
By The FireHydrant Team • 15 October, 2020
TutorialVideoAbout Last Week: A Chaos Conf Wrap-up
Did you catch us at Chaos Conf? That’s a wrap! We had a great time at Chaos Conf…
By Joanna Lin • 13 October, 2020
EventsTesting Our Terraform Resources - Episode 5 of Throughput Thursdays
If you missed last week’s episode, you can find it here. We’ll be taking a…
By Robert Ross • 13 October, 2020
TutorialVideoHow to: Automatically Archive Incident Slack Channels using conditions in FireHydrant Runbooks
FireHydrant's Slack integration is a great way to speed up your incident…
By Rich Burroughs • 7 October, 2020
ProductAdding two Terraform resources - Episode 4 of Throughput Thursdays
Last week we were able to achieve creating two full blown Terraform resources…
By Robert Ross • 5 October, 2020
TutorialVideoHow to: Email Incident Stakeholders with conditions in FireHydrant
Our release of conditions in FireHydrant Runbooks has made it easier for teams…
By Rich Burroughs • 1 October, 2020
ProductNew release: Incident Automation just got even better with conditions in FireHydrant Runbooks
We’ve made your favorite FireHydrant feature, FireHydrant Runbooks, even more…
By Dylan Nielsen • 1 October, 2020
ProductFixing some code sins - Episode 3 of Throughput Thursdays
Last week we built a flexible API client for our Terraform provider that…
By Robert Ross • 30 September, 2020
TutorialVideoAre you going to Chaos Conf?
It’s almost Chaos Conf! Things are gearing up in our preparations for Chaos…
By Joanna Lin • 28 September, 2020
EventsLive from Cape Cod - Throughput Thursdays Ep 2
In this stream, I’m live from Cape Cod, sitting on a dock about 4 inches from…
By Robert Ross • 22 September, 2020
TutorialVideoBuild your API first
I have a beef with companies that don't expose nearly everything their product…
By Bobby Tables • 21 September, 2020
TechThoughtsWe’re building a Terraform Provider! - Episode 1 of Throughput Thursdays
Last week we started out the Terraform provider with a simple data resource…
By Robert Ross • 17 September, 2020
TutorialVideo7 Ways to Get Acquainted With a New Codebase
Diving into a new unfamiliar codebase can be daunting. When I joined…
By Tori Crawford • 16 September, 2020
TechThoughtsDevOpsDays Chicago 2020 Wrapup
DevOpsDays Chicago 2020 was held on September 1, online. It was the first time…
By Rich Burroughs • 3 September, 2020
ConferencesHow FireHydrant's CI/CD infrastructure fixes bugs faster
Almost everyone knows that working with third-party APIs can be challenging…
By Mark Starkman • 2 September, 2020
TechThoughtsKubeCon Europe 2020 Wrapup
Day One - Tuesday KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020 Virtual happened online…
By Rich Burroughs • 26 August, 2020
ConferencesNew Integration: Create Zoom incident bridges automatically
Incident response doesn’t only happen in Slack, so today we’re happy to announce…
By Dylan Nielsen • 28 July, 2020
Feature Releases
Meet Tori Fluharty, Software Engineer
Hey y'all! I'm Tori Fluharty, and I recently joined FireHydrant as a Software…
By Tori Fluharty • 17 July, 2020
ThoughtsWhat is SRE?
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a practice for managing the reliability of…
By Rich Burroughs • 13 July, 2020
SRE
Incident Page Updates
Here at FireHydrant we are always looking for ways to improve and simplify…
By Dylan Nielsen • 6 July, 2020
Feature Releases
PagerDuty Integration Updates
Turn PagerDuty alerts into FireHydrant incidents in one click In an effort to…
By Dylan Nielsen • 6 July, 2020
Feature ReleasesAnnouncing Status Pages
Communication is one of the hardest things to do well while responding to…
By Rich Burroughs • 2 July, 2020
Feature ReleasesHashiConf Digital Wrapup, June 2020
The first HashiConf Digital event was held on June 22-24, online. The event was…
By Rich Burroughs • 30 June, 2020
ConferencesThe Culture of the Codebase
One of the earliest bits of code in Laddertruck, the Ruby on Rails app that…
By Bobby Tables • 24 June, 2020
ThoughtsLaunchDarkly Improves Incident Response with FireHydrant
Headquartered in Oakland, California, LaunchDarkly is a feature management…
By Anna Kelly • 15 June, 2020
Case Studies
Sticking to Your SLAs with FireHydrant Runbooks
In today’s world, systems are increasingly becoming more and more complex. Due…
By Mike Lacsamana • 8 June, 2020
TutorialOncall and COVID-19 Survey Results
Note: This survey was conducted before the recent protests in the US that…
By Rich Burroughs • 2 June, 2020
On-Call
Announcing Our Series A
It's Friday at about quitting time, and my plans for the evening involved a…
By Robert Ross • 20 May, 2020
AnnouncementsDeserted Island DevOps Wrapup
Deserted Island DevOps was held on April 30, 2020, in the game Animal Crossing…
By Rich Burroughs • 4 May, 2020
ConferencesFailover Conf Wrapup
Failover Conf was held on April 21, 2020, online. The folks at Gremlin came…
By Rich Burroughs • 24 April, 2020
ConferencesThe Old Fashioned
If you’re having a hard time enjoying the great indoors you might find solace in…
By Bobby Tables • 21 April, 2020
A Break From Tech
Advice for On-call Teams During COVID-19
I’ve offered some tips up for folks who are oncall during the COVID-19 crisis…
By Rich Burroughs • 16 April, 2020
On-CallThoughts
Meet Mark Starkman, Senior Software Engineer
Hey there! I’m Mark Starkman and I joined FireHydrant last week as a Senior…
By Mark Starkman • 7 April, 2020
Thoughts
OOPS! Learning from Surprise at Netflix
Many of you are stuck at home looking for things to do, so I thought this would…
By Rich Burroughs • 6 April, 2020
Talks We LoveQ&A with Alex Hidalgo on SLOs
Alex Hidalgo is a Site Reliability Engineer at Squarespace, and he's currently…
By Rich Burroughs • 2 April, 2020
Interviews
Meet Rich Burroughs, Senior Developer Advocate
Hi. I’m Rich Burroughs, and I’ve just joined FireHydrant as a Senior Developer…
By Bobby Tables • 26 March, 2020
Thoughts
Announcing Ticketing
Incidents come up quickly and tracking critical tasks to be done in the moment…
By Dylan Nielsen • 17 March, 2020
Feature ReleasesGrow your blame-free culture with these postmortem best practices
Bugs will happen from time to time. As our systems grow in complexity, new…
By Mandy Mak • 9 March, 2020
TechThoughtsMake the most from FireHydrant's Service Catalogs with these 4 tips
Outages are inevitable. It is how we respond that can make or break our company…
By Anna Kelley • 31 January, 2020
TechThoughts3 Ways to Help CS and Engineering Work Better Together
As Engineering teams start spending more time and effort on incident response…
By Anna Kelley • 15 January, 2020
A Break From Tech
Avoid Institutionalized Incident Nonsense
We do things all the time that have better alternatives without giving a single…
By Bobby Tables • 12 November, 2019
Thoughts
Severity Matrix Updates
We’re on a mission to make responding to incidents a bit less chaotic. One of…
By Bobby Tables • 11 November, 2019
AnnouncementsFeature Releases
Announcing Runbooks
Since the beginning, we've wanted to make it faster, easier, and even a joy to…
By Bobby Tables • 17 October, 2019
Feature Releases
A single person on-call “rotation” is a critical vulnerability
One of the most common complaints we hear from operations and site reliability…
By Daniel • 9 October, 2019
TechThoughts
NFS With Docker on macOS Catalina
NFS With Docker on macOS Catalina You like living on the edge, life is fun on…
By Bobby Tables • 8 October, 2019
TechTutorial
Open Source can be a silver bullet, but your application might be a werewolf
I was reminiscing about an incident that happened at a past job with an old co…
By Bobby Tables • 22 September, 2019
TechThoughts
Announcing our AWS CloudTrail Integration
One of the most common reasons for system failures is changes to the underlying…
By Daniel • 16 September, 2019
AnnouncementsFeature Releases
Graceful Error Handling with Redux
Redux powers our global state at FireHydrant, one of the things we use most…
By Dylan Nielsen • 16 September, 2019

Dynamic Kubernetes Informers
In the past I’ve written about how to use informers in Kubernetes for particular…
By Bobby Tables • 28 August, 2019
TechTutorial
Announcing our Statuspage.io integration
Ever go to a status page and it says everything is operational when it…
By Bobby Tables • 22 August, 2019
AnnouncementsFeature Releases
3 Defensive Programming Techniques for Rails
Incidents happen all the time because of bad code deploys. You write some code…
By Bobby Tables • 29 July, 2019
TechTutorialA Gophers Guide to San Diego
The FireHydrant team is dominantly from San Diego, 3 of our 4 person team…
By Bobby Tables • 24 July, 2019
Tech
Announcing Flare: Make opening incidents stress free
We’re launching a new feature today that allows anyone in your organization to…
By Bobby Tables • 28 June, 2019
Feature Releases
So You Want To Give A Tech Talk?
So you’ve signed up to give a tech talk, awesome! You’re a subject matter expert…
By Bobby Tables • 12 June, 2019
Tech
Monitorama 2019 Recap
Talk Recaps John Allspaw Taking Human Performance Seriously In Software The…
By Dylan Nielsen • 7 June, 2019
Tech
Rails without Webpacker
We recently removed webpacker from our Rails 5 application. While it was a great…
By Bobby Tables • 28 May, 2019
Tech
SLO, SLA, SLI Oh My! Creating them can be easy
Imagine you are driving a car on a freeway. Your speedometer is telling you you…
By Bobby Tables • 16 May, 2019

Marketing Site Outage
Earlier today, we experienced an outage of our marketing site for 18 minutes. No…
By Bobby Tables • 10 May, 2019
Post Mortems
Instrumenting Ruby on Rails with Prometheus
If you’re running a production application, you need metrics. There are great…
By Bobby Tables • 5 May, 2019
TechTutorial
Flexible Ruby on Rails Reader Objects
Rails and ActiveRecord are great at providing a simple interface for retrieving…
By Bobby Tables • 1 May, 2019
TechTutorial
Stay Informed with Kubernetes Informers
FireHydrant.io has a changelog feature with a Kubernetes integration. Building…
By Bobby Tables • 1 May, 2019
TechTutorialUnderstanding Istio Ingress
Istio is a hot technology right now. Giants such as Google and IBM have devoted…
By Bobby Tables • 1 May, 2019
Tech
Developer a Go app with Docker Compose
Writing Go applications in an isolated environment with Docker comes with some…
By Bobby Tables • 1 May, 2019
TechTutorialDeveloping a Ruby on Rails app with Docker Compose
Docker Compose is a great tool to develop your Ruby on Rails application locally…
By Bobby Tables • 1 May, 2019
TechTutorial
How FireHydrant Creates Data in Rails
At FireHydrant, we built a platform for integrations from the beginning. This…
By Bobby Tables • 23 April, 2019
Tech
Using React Select with Redux Form
At FireHydrant we use Redux Form for all of our forms. It is extremely easy to…
By Dylan Nielsen • 23 April, 2019
Tech
New Feature: Incident Status Pages
Today we're happy to release our incident status page feature! If you operate…
By Bobby Tables • 11 April, 2019
Feature Releases