We didn’t plan to record anything. Last day of KubeCon Paris, we ran into Solomon Hykes and grabbed a small table at the airport café.
What’s inside
• PyCon 2013. Someone posted their unfinished site to HN, called it vaporware. They shipped in two weeks.
• Adoption before readiness. Dockerfile started as a hack, BuildKit came later to fix scale and correctness.
• Worst incident. Router sent traffic to the wrong apps for minutes. Changes that followed.
• Security as tradeoffs. Containers reshuffled risk models. AI is reshuffling them again.
• Fragmentation. K8s, VMs, Wasm, serverless will coexist. Standardize the pipeline, not the runtime.
• Dagger functions. Pipelines as code you can run locally, mock, debug, and share.
Atlassian is sunsetting Opsgenie. If you're a CTO or eng leader still relying on it for incident response, the clock's ticking especially if you're bundled with JSM (cutoff: Oct 2025). This blog breaks down what comes next, why JSM + Compass won’t cut it, and how to migrate with zero downtime. Includes side-by-side tool comparisons, feature parity breakdowns, and Zenduty’s Opsgenie migration flow (used by 100s of teams).
Most engineering teams often overlook the importance of communicating with customers during incidents. While your team is frantically trying to identify the root cause, your customers are simultaneously searching for your brand on the internet, asking questions such as "Is XYZ down?"
I used to be on-call too. I still have muscle memory of the buzz that’d make me leap off my couch like my house was on fire. Except it wasn’t. Just prod, doing prod things.
We all know it. You trade your peace of mind, sleep, and sometimes personal freedom (hello, “don’t go beyond cell signal” life). And I agree with many of you—it shouldn’t be this way.
We’ve seen teams turn their on-call rotations into something way more humane. Not perfect (nothing in ops is, let’s be real), but sustainable.
At Zenduty, we work with a lot of SREs, DevOps folks, and incident commanders who’ve said, “We can’t keep doing this.” So they started rethinking on-call. One of our partners cut their alert volume by 50%. Half! That’s not a magic trick. Just better processes, better tooling, and some good old-fashioned empathy for the humans behind the screens.
And if your team’s not giving you breathing room after an all-nighter? You deserve better. I’ll just say it.
I saw some of you mention how this stuff becomes political or gets deprioritized in favor of shiny new features. Ugh. I feel that in my bones. The best teams we’ve worked with treat incidents as opportunities to make things better. Every alert is basically your system saying “Help me, I’m tired.” And when you listen and fix it? Less 3 AM wake-ups. Win-win.
Anyway, I didn’t mean to ramble, but this topic is close to home. If you’re still stuck in on-call hell, or just want to vent about it. Always happy to swap war stories or chat about how folks are making on-call suck less.
This Opsgenie announcement has certainly sparked some interesting discussions. Reading through the HN thread, it's fascinating to see how many teams are in similar situations - either just migrated to Opsgenie (ouch!) or trying to figure out what their next move should be.
The confusion around what's actually happening is understandable. While services will continue until 2027, end-of-sale in 2025 means many teams are already evaluating alternatives rather than waiting for the last minute.
Something that really resonated with me from gregdoesit's comment was that reminder of the 2022 outage where OpsGenie was down for two weeks for some customers. That incident highlighted something we think about constantly at Zenduty: paging services are mission-critical infrastructure.
When your alerting system goes down, you're essentially flying blind. I've been working with teams dealing with exactly these transitions, and the migration challenges are real - it's never just "update a webhook URL" as someone mentioned. Your alert routing rules, escalation policies, on-call schedules, and integrations are complex systems that need careful migration.
What I'm curious about: for those of you considering alternatives, what features matter most to you? Is it reliability? Pricing? Integration flexibility? The ability to reduce alert fatigue? Feel free to drop your thoughts here or DM me. Always happy to chat about these challenges even if you're not looking at Zenduty specifically. These transitions are stressful, and having been through them myself, I know how disruptive they can be to engineering teams who just want to focus on building their products.
Welcome to the Incident Response 2025 Survey! Your feedback is crucial in helping us understand current practices and future needs in incident management.
Survey Details:
- Estimated completion time: 10 minutes
- All responses are confidential
Rewards for Participation:
- 50 randomly selected participants will receive $50 gift cards
- Option to receive the completed survey report directly to your inbox
- Early access to future research findings
The final report will be published openly and shared with the broader community(r/sre, r/devops, r/sysadmin), but survey participants will be the first to receive the insights.
By completing this survey, you're helping shape the future of incident management practices. We appreciate your time and expertise!
What’s inside • PyCon 2013. Someone posted their unfinished site to HN, called it vaporware. They shipped in two weeks. • Adoption before readiness. Dockerfile started as a hack, BuildKit came later to fix scale and correctness. • Worst incident. Router sent traffic to the wrong apps for minutes. Changes that followed. • Security as tradeoffs. Containers reshuffled risk models. AI is reshuffling them again. • Fragmentation. K8s, VMs, Wasm, serverless will coexist. Standardize the pipeline, not the runtime. • Dagger functions. Pipelines as code you can run locally, mock, debug, and share.