Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

August 2021

The Fast & The Foolproof: Automation & Observability For DevOps

When software teams are charged with delivering higher quality software, faster - how do you effectively enable collaboration and observability while eliminating risk and manual processes? In this webinar, Ali Sardar from JFrog and Rob Jahn from Dynatrace will address how to overcome these challenges and unlock speed, observability, and automation across your DevOps lifecycle. In addition to best practices shared by our speakers, you will also see both products in action - meeting the critical needs of development and operations teams.

Deploying your Gradle Build Cache Node using GCP

This tutorial is a follow-up to TurboCharging your Android Gradle builds using build cache . The key focus of this post is the remote build cache, a build speed acceleration technology that can be implemented for both local and CI builds. This is a technology worth knowing about because: Gradle provides a build cache node available as a Docker image. You can host this image in a number of ways.

Scanning Dependencies in your sources using JFrog CLI and Xray

Security vulnerabilities and license violations should be found as early as possible and the earlier in the SDLC , the better. As part of the “ Shift Left ” vision, JFrog CLI and Xray now allow scanning dependencies directly from sources , on-demand, using a simple command line. This functionality allows benefiting from the same JFrog Xray vulnerability and license scanning capabilities, even before deployment to JFrog Artifactory.

The More the Merrier: Multi-Arch Docker Manifests with Buildx and Artifactory

The cloud native promise to be able to “build once, deploy anywhere” is nearly fulfilled. With containerization and Docker , we can build our applications and services for any environment, and set configuration at runtime. Well,… almost. Operating systems and apps still need to be compiled to execute on specific architecture types. Your software that’s been compiled for an AMD64 processor can’t run on an ARM-based machine, nor can one built for Linux run on Windows.

It's Time to Get Hip to the SBOM

The DevOps, IT security and IT governance communities will remember 2021 as the year when the Software Bill of Materials , or SBOM, graduated from a “nice to have” to a “must have.” Around for years, the SBOM has now become a critical DevSecOps piece, which everyone must thoroughly understand and incorporate into their SDLC (Software Development Lifecycle).

Monitoring Your Software Supply Chain On Kubernetes With Datadog And JFrog

You have mission-critical applications, JFrog and DataDog collaborated for a unified solution. Together, we ensure the dependable operation of your JFrog Platform by tracking usage data of Artifactory and Xray through Datadog’s modern SaaS-based log monitoring tool. We will show you how to boost efficiency of your DevOps pipeline to keep your software releases running seamlessly and securely.

The Confident Commit ep. 9 | Amplifying your organizational expertise with Marko Gargenta

Rob sits down with Marko Gargenta to discuss helping developers build real knowledge about delivering software effectively. Marko shares how he came to realize that learning, training, and empowering new knowledge is vital for aspiring technical professionals. For many organizations, investment in knowledge building through education and training has slashed time waste, inspired new development, and supported overall growth.

Top 6 benefits of virtualization

Virtualization has been with us since the 1960s. In computer science terms, it is about as old as the hills. Yet this old-school idea has never been more relevant. We all know hardware is expensive. Despite the cost, many businesses squander their precious processing power. All too often, a “one server, one purpose” mindset leads IT departments to waste server capacity. With virtualization, we leave this myopic view of server management in the dust.

Release code confidently with Automatic Faulty Deployment Detection

Modern software development teams use CI/CD tools to ship features quickly and rely on best practices like shift-left testing to find application errors before they become user-facing bugs. But you still face the risk that any code you deploy could contain errors that your testing did not surface. To help you deploy with confidence and mitigate the effects of a bad deployment, Datadog APM now provides Automatic Faulty Deployment Detection.

Simplifying App Deployments for Developers - A Short History from Timesharing to Serverless

I have been in the IT industry for a few decades now and have helped launch waves of technology in the constant pursuit of making computing easier, cheaper and with greater uptime. This all started well before my entry into the IT industry and will continue to well past the time I retire. However, it is always good to understand where we have been and look how far we have come to understand how we can continue to make it even better.

Functional browser testing with Puppeteer

Most interactions with a web application occur at the browser. Users search items, fill forms, create shopping carts, log into their profiles, and perform many other tasks. Unit tests are great, but nothing beats testing an application by interacting with the user-facing frontend. In this tutorial, you will learn and demonstrate how to write tests for the browser using Puppeteer . You will then take this a step further by automating the testing process in a continuous integration flow.

How to protect your secrets with Spectral and JFrog Pipelines

Thousands of secrets leak daily on public git repositories, including over two million corporate secrets in 2020 alone. This can happen to anyone! For example, in January 2021, an Amazon cloud engineer accidentally committed almost a gigabyte worth of sensitive data that included their own personal documents, as well as passwords and cryptographic keys to various AWS environments on his personal GitHub repository.

An exciting update on diff and merge performance

Back in July I published Encountering some turbulence on Bitbucket's journey to a new platform, sharing with the public for the first time that Bitbucket Cloud is in the final stages of a migration from our data center onto Atlassian's cloud platform—the same internal platform underlying Jira Cloud, Confluence Cloud, Statuspage, and many other internal services. I also shared that because of increased file system latency as a result of this platform move, certain operations have become slower.

Spot's journey with Argo Rollouts

Modern, cloud-based software development lifecycles have quickly evolved from waterfall and are fully embracing the agile principles of DevOps. As part of this shift, continuous delivery practices have been adopted, giving organizations the capability to deliver and release code faster and more frequently than ever before. CI/CD tools bring velocity — code is always ready to be deployed, enabling organizations to commit multiple times a day.

Adding Observability to your CI/CD pipeline in CircleCI

In modern software systems, it is common for several developers to work on the same project simultaneously. Siloed working with infrequent merging of code in a shared repository often leads to bugs and conflicts that are difficult and time-consuming to resolve. To solve this problem, we can adopt continuous integration.

DevOps 101: Introduction to CI/CD

When you’re new to an industry, you encounter § a lot of new concepts. We tend to use a lot of jargon, the documentation may be written for someone more experienced in mind or rely on contextual knowledge of the rest of the space, and it often doesn’t explain the “why” for the tool. This can make it really difficult to get your feet underneath you in an unfamiliar landscape, especially for junior engineers.

No Internet? No Problem. Use Artifactory with an Air Gap - Part I

Virtually all development organizations need access to remote public resources such as Maven Central, NuGet Gallery, npmjs.org, Docker Hub etc., to download dependencies needed for a build. One of the big benefits of using Artifactory is its remote repositories which proxy these remote resources and cache artifacts that are downloaded.

Create a continuous deployment pipeline for Django applications

Django is the most popular web development framework for the Python programming language. Its design facilitates rapid development without compromising on the standards of professionally built applications. It is free, open source, uses the Model-View-Template architectural pattern, and encapsulates a lot of boilerplates to enable developers churn out web apps quickly.

How to set up a Private, Remote and Virtual npm Registry

The simplest way to manage and organize your Node dependencies is with an npm repository. You need reliable, secure, consistent and efficient access to your dependencies that are shared across your team, in a central location. Including a place to set up multiple registries, that work transparently with the npm client. With the JFrog free cloud subscription, including JFrog Artifactory, Xray and Pipelines, you can set up a free local, remote and virtual npm registry in minutes.

It's official! Announcing Runners in Bitbucket Pipelines

You've always been able to execute CI/CD workflows via Bitbucket Pipelines using Atlassian's infrastructure. This is the easiest way to use Bitbucket Pipelines because you don't need to host or manage any servers. We host it and manage it for you. But sometimes you need more control of your hardware, software, and the environment your builds are executed into.

Navigating the Artifact Jungle, Where Development Meets Delivery

As developers, we spend most of our time thinking about code: how to design it, write it, debug it, integrate it. Our thoughts are of our source files, our attention is on the repositories and branches that populate our version control system. That’s our job, that’s our world. But to become DevOps professionals, we must think about what happens to take our code to the clusters where it runs. DevOps means taking our applications from development to delivery.

A Policy Change To Prevent Abuse on JFrog Cloud

As of August 5, 2021, JFrog will require newly created free JFrog cloud subscription users to provide valid credit or debit card information in order to activate Pipelines CI/CD. In the months since offering Pipelines CI/CD as part of a free JFrog cloud subscription, we have unfortunately experienced a rapid growth in abuse of the free compute resources from some accounts.

Use InfluxDB with GitHub Actions for GitOps, CI/CD, and Data Transformation

GitHub Actions are a powerful way to add automation to any source code repository. When you take that power and connect it with InfluxDB, you get an amazing combination that allows you to automate data generation, manage GitOps workflows, and a whole lot more. This post will highlight some of the interesting ways to use InfluxDB and GitHub Actions.

Override Jenkins default executor configuration for more control over cloud infrastructure

The Spot Jenkins plugin allows Jenkins to manage Elastigroups, enabling users to run servers with spot instances and take advantage of the other Elastigroup features. It’s a powerful integration that Spot is continuously improving in order to give our users even more control over their application infrastructure.

Integrating Speedscale with Jenkins

Minimizing and automating the path from development and production is necessary in order to stay competitive and keep customers happy. As engineering teams strive to solve this by quickly and efficiently rolling out new features, updates, and bug fixes, continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) has come to be regarded as an industry best practice. One of the most popular CI/CD solutions is Jenkins, an open-source job execution system.