Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

How Fivetran uses Activations internally to power integrations, operations, and product workflows.

The rapid proliferation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents and Large Language Models (LLMs) is transforming how businesses operate. From automating customer service to generating complex reports, AI agents are becoming indispensable. However, this explosion of AI-driven interactions brings with it significant challenges in management, security, and governance.

Enterprise adoption of large language models introduces a fundamental security challenge: how do you grant AI agents access to internal data without creating a backdoor that bypasses your existing access controls? Traditional database connections rely on service accounts with broad permissions, but when an LLM queries your customer records or financial data on behalf of a user, it must respect that user's specific entitlements.

As organizations embed Quality Assurance into their SDLC with Jira and Xray, the resulting test data becomes a strategic enterprise asset, vital for product quality, test case traceability, and regulatory compliance. Protecting this asset is paramount, and as its scale and importance grow, organizations require specialized data management capabilities that go beyond standard application features to ensure complete resilience and governance.

Most enterprises have made the commitment to AI. They’ve approved the budgets, stood up the pilots, and named it a strategic priority. So why are 95% of them getting zero return on $30–40 billion in GenAI investment? According to MIT research cited in Hitachi Vantara’s 2025 State of Data Infrastructure Global Report — which surveyed more than 1,200 IT leaders across 15 markets — the failure isn’t the model. It’s the infrastructure underneath it.

As organizations scale their AI initiatives from experimentation into production, CTOs face a pivotal architectural challenge as storage emerges as one of the most common—and most expensive—constraints. While organizations continue to invest aggressively in GPU compute, studies consistently show that infrastructure inefficiencies outside the GPU account for the majority of wasted AI spend.

Bringing APIs and events together has always been a challenge. REST APIs give developers a familiar interface, while event brokers like Solace Broker excel at fan-out, filtering, and scalable, reliable event delivery. The tricky part? Bridging these two worlds without building a lot of custom glue. That’s exactly what the new Kong plugin for Solace upstream mediation does.

Test automation is essential for modern software delivery. It supports faster feedback loops, strengthens release confidence, and enables continuous integration at scale. Yet despite its importance, many teams struggle to expand automation at the pace they need. The biggest obstacle is not validating functionality. It is converting structured manual tests into actionable automation scripts. Manual tests already represent validated logic.

Most AI applications start the same way: wire up an LLM, stream tokens to the browser, ship. That works for simple request-response. It breaks when sessions outlast a connection, when users switch devices, or when an agent needs to hand off to a human. The cracks appear in the delivery layer, not the model. Every serious production team discovers this independently and builds their own workaround. Those workarounds don't hold once users start hitting them in production.

Organizations over the years have seen the writing on the wall: The future is cloud. Now, these companies and their DevOps teams areevolving, innovating, and pursuing new technologies, to gain a competitive edge and create new efficiencies. One of the ways they’re doing this is through application migration to cloud. In this blog, I’ll detail the nuances of application migration and how to best manage data during it, including various challenges and their solutions.