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Showing posts with the label engineering testing

Use Site Reliability Engineering to Address Cloud Instability

Cloud platforms, as a remotely managed service, come with a service-level agreement (SLA) that guarantees an uptime percentage or your money back. These SLAs, and the shifting of responsibility of infrastructure maintenance from your organisation or colocation provider to the clouds in use in your organisation, have prompted an expectation that cloud services will “just work”, even though reality often falls short of that. Computing infrastructure has become faster and cheaper over time, but a server today is not meaningfully more reliable than a decade ago, because the root causes of outages are often environmental or the result of third-party error. Some outages over the past two years have been eyebrow-raising in their origin, effect or circumstances. The fire that destroyed OVHcloud’s Strasbourg SBG2 facility in March 2021 was the result of a faulty repair to an uninterruptable power supply. Cooling systems failed to keep pace with the London heatwave in July, leading to ou...

Testing Is Key to Turning an Innovative Idea into a Successful Commercial Medical Device

Formulating an innovative idea is only the first step in creating a successful commercial product. Design and engineering teams make countless decisions as they bring the idea to life. Testing provides an objective way for these teams to assess progress and improve the design at each stage of development. Creating a successful commercial product is a challenging endeavor. It requires marketing insight, design creativity, and technical expertise. Whether a team is developing a complex laboratory instrument, a novel medical device, or an innovative consumer product, the effort is a dynamic process that requires the team to make a thousand decisions (or more!) as they work to bring the product to market. How can a team ensure that all those decisions result in a product that will excite customers and create a profitable business? Purposeful testing at each stage of development is the key. Different types of tests are needed at each stage of development. These tests serve as objecti...