Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

March 2020

Automating our Vanilla releases with GitHub actions

The Vanilla framework has a history of being released very infrequently. Sometimes it has been months between releases, which made the upgrade process often hard and time-consuming. One of the reasons for that was a manual and a quite time-consuming release process. Over several weeks earlier this year, we’ve been working on various improvements that helped us release more frequently and reliably.

Edge AI in a 5G world - part 1: How 'smart cell towers' will change our lives

In part 1 we will talk about the industrial applications and benefits that 5G and fast compute at the edge in the form of ‘smart cell towers’ will bring to AI products. In part 2 we will go deeper into how you can benefit from this new opportunity. Part 3 will focus on the key technical barriers that 5G and Edge compute remove for AI applications.

Learn snapcraft by example - multi-app client-server snap

Over the past few months, we published a number of articles showing how to snap desktop applications written in different languages – Rust, Java, C/C++, and others. In each one of these zero-to-hero guides, we went through a representative snapcraft.yaml file and highlighted the specific bits and pieces developers need to successfully build a snap. Today, we want to diverge from this journey and focus on the server side of things.

Securing open source through CVE prioritisation

According to a recent study, 96% of applications in the enterprise market use open-source software. As the open-source landscape becomes more and more fragmented, the task to assess the impact of potential security vulnerabilities for an organisation can become overwhelming. Ubuntu is known as one of the most secure operating systems, but why? Ubuntu is a leader in security because, every day, the Ubuntu Security team is fixing and releasing updated software packages for known vulnerabilities.

How Domotz streamlined provisioning of IoT devices

As the number of IoT devices scale, the challenges of provisioning and keeping them up to date in the field increases. Domotz, who manufacture an all-in-one, network monitoring and management device for enterprise IoT networks, found themselves with this challenge that was further compounded by their rapid software release cadence. One of the most crucial and difficult aspects for Domotz to solve was the delivery of automatic updates to the tens of thousands of devices deployed.

How to launch IoT devices - Part 4: When to ask for help

(This blog post is part of a 5 part series, titled “How to launch IoT devices”. It will cover the key choices and concerns when turning bright IoT ideas into a product in the market. Sign up to the webinar on how to launch IoT devices to get the full story, all in one place.) First part: Why does IoT take so long? Second part: Select the right hardware and foundations Third part: IoT devices and infrastructure

Building a Raspberry Pi cluster with MicroK8s

The tutorial for building a Raspberry Pi cluster with MicroK8s is here. This blog is not a tutorial. This blog aims to answer; why? Why would you build a Raspberry Pi cluster with MicroK8s? Here we go a little deeper to understand the hype around Kubernetes, the uses of cluster computing and the capabilities of MicroK8s.

Cloud Instance Initialisation with cloud-init

Private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud... the variety of locations, platforms and physical substrate you can start a cloud instance on is vast. Yet once you have selected an operating system which best supports your application stack, you should be able to use that operating system as an abstraction layer between different clouds.

The no-nonsense way to accelerate your business with containers

Container technology has brought about a step-change in virtualisation technology. Organisations implementing containers see considerable opportunities to improve agility, efficiency, speed, and manageability within their IT environments. Containers promise to improve datacenter efficiency and performance without having to make additional investments in hardware or infrastructure. Traditional hypervisors provide the most common form of virtualisation, and virtual machines running on such hypervisors are pervasive in nearly every datacenter.