Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

September 2022

Run Datadog Synthetic tests in Azure Pipelines

Continuous integration (CI) demands continous testing: shifting left helps prevent faulty code from spreading, which is one of the core aims of CI. Datadog’s new Azure DevOps extension enables you to seamlessly incorporate integration and end-to-end tests into existing CI/CD workflows on Azure Pipelines, a dedicated CI/CD service that automatically runs builds, performs tests, and deploys your services and applications via cloud-hosted pipelines.

Chaos testing: Reliability for cloud-native apps

Reliability is a critical concern for software delivery teams. Every second of lackluster performance or service interruption comes with high costs. The consequences can extend beyond just monetary expenses and have a huge impact on a company’s reputation. In a survey conducted in 2022, participants reported that over 60% of digital infrastructure failures resulted in losses of $100,000 or more.

What role does ingenuity play in software development? ft. Bryan Finster of Defense Unicorns

Is it possible that the new tech and clever ideas can get in the way of adding value to our business? Bryan Finster, Distinguished Engineer at Defense Unicorn, sits down with Rob and shares how his perspective on solving business problems with code. Learn valuable insights on how we can keep the end user in mind while using technology to make their lives better.

SBOMs The New Standard in Supply Chain Security - DevOpsCon NY 2022

Software supply chain attacks using software vulnerabilities remain a key avenue of initial access for attackers Organizations had to scramble to find out if critical vulnerabilities like Log4J were running on their systems. In response, Software Bill of Materials or SBOMs are being quickly adopted by enterprises around the globe, so what are they all about? The Linux Foundation research team revealed that 78% of organizations expect to produce or consume the Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs) in 2022.

JFrog's Newest Board Member Shares Her Thoughts on DevOps, Security & IoT

As At JFrog, we are passionate about hiring talented people who will help us leap higher and think big, further our innovation, and win in the market – it’s written in our Codex. For this reason, we continue to grow our board of directors and advisors because having solid guidance and the right mix of talent on our board is important to help us, our community and shareholders reach the next level of success in a market that is defined by rapid transformation.

Remote vs office, Stack Overflow diversity, CTO skills, Meta layoffs, hiring fraud, and more - News

Atlassian releases the State of Teams report, DevOps World 2022 is postponed, Stack Overflow has a diversity problem, CTOs should be technical, layoffs abound, and hiring fraud is just getting weird. These stories and more on Sleuth News. 0:06: Remote vs Office? 0:43: Remote vs Office? (commentary) About Sleuth: Give Sleuth a try and see why it's a deploy-based Accelerate / DORA metrics tracker both managers and developers love.

Improving Software Failure: Measure, Change, Learn

How do you treat software development failure? Do you take time to measure and learn from software failure? Or do you try to fix it quickly only after your customers complain about it? Failure can be an opportunity to learn and get better. So how can you measure and learn from software failure, and turn failure into at least a partially positive experience? Failure happens all the time, but if you're not measuring it, how do you know what you’re missing?

Top 20 CI/CD Pipeline Interview Questions & Answers

The key to acing a CI/CD interview is preparation. The first step in preparation is to learn as much as you can about the possible company, including its background, offerings, and hiring practices. In order to help you master your next interview and land your dream job, this blog post includes CICD interview questions, all neatly organized into themes.. Refreshing your technical knowledge is the next item on the list because it will help you stand apart.

Automate deployment of a Vue.js application to Firebase

A quick search of the internet will reveal many services available for freely hosting single page applications or static sites. Firebase is one of these services. Firebase is a development platform developed by Google that provides file storage, hosting, database, authentication, and analytics. It is free, provides an SSL certificate by default, and offers impressive speed across multiple regions. I have chosen Firebase for hosting our demo application in this tutorial.

How to get complete CI/CD pipeline observability

It's not like it used to be back in the day! Before CI/CD, we were building on-premises, service-oriented products following system style architecture and we were able to map out the build system and end-to-end process in a PowerPoint or Visio document. Although time-consuming and inefficient, it was relatively straightforward and the build pipeline was unlikely to change drastically. But that's no longer the case.

Get Certified with Argo CD - Now at Level 2 with "Gitops at Scale"

At the start of this year, Codefresh announced the first ever GitOps certification for Argo CD. The certification consists of 3 different levels covering GitOps end-to-end from beginning to end. With the launch of Level 1 (Fundamentals), we have seen an unprecedented interest from people that want to learn about GitOps resulting in over 10,000 students and 3,000 certified engineers!

DORA metrics: Where are you on the journey? @Sleuth TV

We're wrapping up Season 1 of Sleuth TV Live! We've covered a lot of ground, so we'll pull it all together with a talk about the DORA metrics journey and where you can go from here. In episode 6 of Sleuth TV Live, Sleuth's CTO Don Brown and Head of Customer Success Leigh Ann Whitmarsh discussed four levels along the DORA metrics journey, with tips and real-life examples of the opportunities available to maximize your investment in DORA metrics.

Polyglot persistence vs multi-model databases for microservices

Microservice architecture is an application system design pattern in which an entire business application is composed of individual functional scoped services, which can scale on demand. Each team focuses on an individual service and builds it according to their skillset or language of choice. In addition to flexibility, this pattern provides: These features have made microservices architecture a popular choice for enterprises.

Get More From Your JFrog Platform Using the Cloud Marketplaces

These days, organizations of all types, sizes and industries are using the cloud for a wide variety of business reasons and use cases. Benefits include agility, elasticity, cost savings, ease of deployment, ease of management, ease of procurement and ability to leverage cutting edge technologies. JFrog customers are no different. Indeed, JFrog recognizes that many customers want a hybrid cloud approach with the ability to work across multi-clouds.

Speed up XCUITest execution with parallelism and test splitting

In this article, I’ll show you how to reduce the execution time of XCUITest (UI tests on iOS simulators) by splitting and running them in parallel. Automated tests and CI/CD platforms like CircleCI are necessary for iOS application development. It is important not only to introduce them once but to improve them continuously. When application code grows and automated tests increase, the execution time of build and test in CI/CD gets longer.

The Future of CI/CD: Challenge on the Horizon

Over the last 10 years, software development has shifted. Modern teams build applications on top of third-party dependencies, open source libraries, and more, which has dramatically increased complexity. With so much complexity in software development, how can today’s dev teams build with speed and agility while avoiding risk? Join CircleCI CTO, Rob Zuber, in the first of three executive webinars aimed at empowering CircleCI customers to optimize their software delivery practices.

Expanding the security frontier with JFrog Xray

How are you currently addressing the challenges of securing your software supply chain? In today’s world it’s essential to go beyond just standard security tools when safeguarding your applications from development to production? But it doesn’t need a plethora of point solutions to do that. The JFrog DevSecOps Platform can take care of it. Expand the software security frontier and join the JFrog Product Management team, as they discuss how JFrog Xray provides intelligent supply chain security and compliance at DevOps speed.

Software Delivery Platforms to Benefit DevOps Practices

In this era where applications are taking over the world, delivering the service to your customer with scalability and security is of the utmost importance. The software delivery platform helps to manage the data flow, traffic management, and security of the data from both sides of the application. If you are studying software delivery platforms, then most of you must have heard about the Codefresh software delivery platform for continuous integration and continuous deployment of the application.

Introducing the CircleCI Config SDK

We are excited to announce the new CircleCI Config SDK is now available as an open-source TypeScript library. Developers can now write and manage their CircleCI config.yml files using TypeScript and JavaScript. For developers used to the ecosystem and flexibility of a full-fledged programming language, sometimes YAML can feel limiting or intimidating. With the Config SDK you can define and generate your YAML config from type-safe and annotated JavaScript.

The DORA metrics backstory

DORA metrics are becoming the industry standard for measuring engineering efficiency, but where did they come from? ‍ We talk a lot about DORA metrics here at Sleuth — what they are and how to measure them. But we haven’t shared much about the context of DORA metrics — their history and why we use them. So let’s do that. This article provides a summary.

How Rush Capped Time to Resolution by Integrating Sentry With Their With CI/CD Pipeline

Rated as the top order tracking and revenue generation app on Shopify, Rush lets businesses build and personalize their own dashboards to manage the post-sale process with real-time data, custom product recommendations, and user feedback. Their business model focuses on low touch and user-centered design (UCD), which leaves little room for issues impacting how people interact with the platform.

Scaling up your CI/CD Pipeline as your Organization Grows

As enterprises adopt cloud-based technologies, their IT infrastructure becomes more complex. The need to constantly scale up the CI/CD pipeline presents new challenges for IT teams. This blog post will share best practices and learnings from our work with enterprise customers who have successfully scaled up their CI/CD pipelines and discuss how to solve these challenges with Cloudify in production environments.

Canary vs blue-green deployment to reduce enterprise downtime

Even before the cloud, no one liked deployment downtime. With applications hosted in traditional data centers that restricted access for local users, many organizations scheduled deployments when users were less likely to be using the applications, like the middle of the night. With widespread adoption of cloud-based, 24x7 environments available from all time zones, every hour of the day, easy-to-find deployment windows are gone.

DevOps top programming languages support engineering metrics goals

This post, authored by CircleCI Senior Technical Content Marketing Manager Jacob Schmitt, was originally published on The New Stack. One of the privileges of working in the continuous integration space is the unique perspective it offers into how software teams organize their work to deliver value quickly without sacrificing quality, security, or developer happiness. At CircleCI, we support more than 2 million developers running 90 million build, test, and deploy jobs each month.

Experimenting our way to success ft. Aniel Sud, CTO of Optimizely

In this episode, Rob is joined by Optimizely CTO, Aniel Sud, to discuss the importance of experimenting for growth. Entrepreneurship and innovation require courage, but having courage can bring on emotions that make it difficult for us to experiment objectively. How do we hold our strong opinions loosely to press forward with new information?

Difference between Docker Image & Docker Container

A Docker image is a combination of instructions and for creating a docker container a instruction is used to execute code in a Docker container. Docker images work as a set of instructions to build and run a Docker container, as a template. Docker images also perform as the initial point when using Docker. A Docker image contains read-only files. when a docker image is created it can not be changed and modified, insert template that has instructions for deploying containers.

Automate testing for a Vue.js application

One of the leading frameworks in the JavaScript community, Vue.js is a progressive framework for building reusable components for the web user interface. Its intuitive API and robust flexibility for handling front-end logic are just two of the reasons that Vue has been adopted by developers worldwide. In this tutorial, I will lead you through building a simple listing application that shows the names and roles of users. I will show you how to write tests for the application.

Jenkins vs. Jenkins X: Which Automation Server Should You Choose?

Today’s DevOps teams can reach project goals quickly because they rely on continuous integration and continuous development (CI/CD) tools that automate tasks. The problem is that there are tons of CI/CD tools out there. How do you know which one serves your team’s needs best? Jenkins stood out as a top contender for years after its release in 2011. More recently (2018), Jenkins X appeared as an alternative.

Cloudsmith: The Single Source of Truth For Your Artifact Management

Say hello to Cloudsmith! Cloudsmith is the only cloud-native, global, universal artifact management platform for engineers looking to set up a secure artifact repository in 60 seconds. Cloudsmith offers support for 28+ formats, has 410+ points of presence, is ISO 27001 certified, and integrates with all of the tools you already use and love.

Announcing macOS Runners in Bitbucket Pipelines

We are happy to announce that Bitbucket Pipelines now supports macOS self-hosted runners. We have moved from beta to an official release. You can now create a self-hosted runner and run it on your macOS infrastructure to run macOS and iOS builds. Since you’re using your own runner, you won't be charged for Bitbucket Pipelines build minutes.

Mobile app security testing: tools and best practices

To minimize the security risks of an application, developers need their apps to stand up to stringent security testing. Fortunately, there are tools available that simplify and even automate these security tests. There are also best practices to guide and inform the testing process. In this article, I will cover the most common security issues for mobile apps and highlight popular security tests.

Should you measure developer productivity? @Sleuth TV

In episode 4 of Sleuth TV Live, Sleuth's CTO Don Brown and CEO Dylan Etkin had an engaging, insightful conversation about how DORA metrics connect to your people and how they play into developers' happiness. Check out specific points in the conversation: Resources mentioned in this episode: Give Sleuth a try and see why it's a deploy-based Accelerate / DORA metrics tracker both managers and developers love.

Deploy a Dockerized Laravel application

As web applications become more complex, software engineering teams must rely on many different products and services to create the best developer experience. The application development ecosystem has grown beyond version control and hosting deployment. Manually managing the deployment of new features across all services can create a serious bottleneck in the software development lifecycle. It also introduces the risk of human error.

CI/CD for Jira - The Jira DevOps Tool for Git

The team at GitKraken is thrilled to announce a brand new, free extension for Git Integration for Jira, the top-rated tool on the Atlassian Marketplace for using Git with Jira. Now, users can enhance their Jira DevOps workflow with build and deployment data directly in Jira Cloud. The CI/CD for Jira extension will allow teams to seamlessly connect data from their CI/CD pipeline with Jira Cloud.

Authors' Cut-No More Pipeline Blues: Accelerate CI/CD with Observability

It’s no secret that CI/CD pipelines make the lives of engineering and operations easier by accelerating the feedback loop for higher quality code and apps. They build code, run tests, and safely deploy new versions of your application. But just like any aspect of development, poor integration, invisible bottlenecks, and bugs can plague your pipelines. And debugging them? Well, it’s complicated.

JFrog Joins Rust Foundation as Platinum Member

The technology ecosystem is continually evolving but one truth remains, if there is a new and emerging coding language that captures the heart and minds of developers JFrog will be there. JFrog provides a DevOps Platform to store and secure its artifacts while engaging with the community and foundations that support developers using that language. We have a long history of working with Java, Python, C/C++ and more recently Go, Swift and Rust.

The Software Supply Chain Risks You Need to Know

Code that an organization’s developers create is only the beginning of modern software development. In fact, first-party code is likely to be only a small proportion of an application – sometimes as little as 10% of the application’s artifact ecosystem. An enterprise’s software supply chain is made of many parts, from many sources: open source packages, commercial software, infrastructure-as-code (IaC) files, and more.

Automate deployment of React applications to Firebase

Many platforms offer free hosting services for React and other JavaScript frameworks. These frameworks can be used for building single-page applications, which is handy when you need to launch a minimum viable product or a quick proof of concept. Your fellow developers are taking advantage of these tools, and you can too. To narrow down options, I will focus on Firebase in this tutorial.

Continuous performance testing for mobile apps

As of 2021, roughly 5.7 million mobile apps are available in app stores — 2.2 million for iOS and 3.48 million for Android users. Given the massive numbers, customers have a wide variety of choices. With such a high number of apps available, customer satisfaction is paramount, which means avoiding customer churn and retaining users.

Top 8 CI/CD Best Practices for Building Successful Applications

Developers commonly integrate the code and these frequent modifications in a central repository as part of the software development method is known as continuous integration (CI). Improved software quality, faster quality audit and bug fixes, and quick validation and release cycles are all major goals of continuous integration. Continuous Delivery (CD), which builds on top of Continuous Integration(CI), includes automating both builds and the complete software release process.