We put a lot of effort into building zero-trust networks, creating Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs), and securing our production clusters. But industry data shows that most breaches still happen for one main reason: compromised credentials. When delivery pressure increases, especially with AI coding assistants encouraging speed, developers regularly prioritise convenience over security. As a result, secrets can end up in local build configs, get committed to repositories,

In Part 1, I detailed how an unprimed Oracle Exadata Flash Cache after a weekend Disaster Recovery (DR) test spiked database latency from 40ms to 20 minutes, triggering connection timeouts and an emergency incident. Allowing the cache to warm organically over 12 hours stabilised the system. But waiting for hardware to warm was treating a symptom. The incident exposed the fragility of our core data layer: every user login executed a massive, runtime deduplication query across

At 8:45 AM on a Monday, an incident alert replaced our daily stand-up. Over 200 engineers, operations leads, and executives joined the emergency bridge. Production was halted: database CPU hit 90%, response times degraded from 40ms to over 20 minutes, and customers could not log in. Because banking platforms operate as critical national infrastructure, every minute of total unavailability triggers mandatory self-reporting to financial regulators like BaFin. The Incident: Fa

Our company recently upgraded Bitbucket, allowing us to sign our commits. This feature was introduced in September 2024, even though...

Today, I will share my experience with time in our Oracle database. Surprisingly, it is very fluid and relative. Everything started with...

Logging is more than technical issues such as log level or a logback configuration. They are also important but optional. I'll show you...