This month, we’re focused on sharing a more comprehensive picture of our reliability and availability. We experienced 6 extended incidents, 2 of which were due to an upstream third party. While we always want to be transparent with our performance against our stated goals, it’s crucial to note that, while they lasted 60 minutes or longer, the impact of these August incidents on our business operations was relatively minimal.
A Docker container is a portable software package that holds an application’s code, necessary dependencies, and environment settings in a lightweight, standalone, and easily runnable form. When running an application in Docker, you might need to perform some analysis or troubleshooting to diagnose and fix errors. Rather than recreating the environment and testing it separately, it is often easier to SSH into the Docker container to check on its health.
Software development, agility and efficiency are paramount. Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) practices have revolutionised the way we build, test, and deploy software. When coupled with the power of Kubernetes, an open-source container orchestration platform, organisations can achieve a level of deployment excellence that was once only a dream.
This post was written with valuable contributions from Michael Webster, Kira Muhlbauer, Tim Cheung, and Ryan Hamilton. Remember the advent of the internet in the 90s? Mobile in the 2010s? Both seemed overhyped at the start, yet in each case, fast-moving, smart teams were able to take these new technologies at their nascent stage and experiment to transform their businesses. This is the moment we’re in with artificial intelligence. The technology is here.
Ansible is a configuration management tool that helps you automatically deploy, manage, and configure software on your hosts. By turning manual workflows into automated processes, you can quicken your deployment lifecycle and ensure that all hosts are equipped with the proper configurations and tools. The Datadog collection is now available in both Ansible Galaxy and Ansible Automation Hub.
This short tutorial demonstrates how you can work on data stored on your own infrastructure or in hybrid cloud CI/CD environments using CircleCI’s shared workspaces functionality — without having to configure VPNs, SSH tunnels, or other additional infrastructure.
Version control is a system for tracking and managing changes to a software project over time. It provides a structured way to document modifications, ensuring that every alteration is recorded along with details such as who made the change and when it occurred. This history allows multiple team members to work on the same project without overwriting each other’s work and to easily revert to previous versions of the project when necessary.
Effective user experience (UX) design is a key factor in creating compelling software products. UX considers the quality of interaction that users have with a product and takes the user’s point of view as the most sacred thing in software and product design. A great UX includes accessibility, which ensures that software is inclusive and usable by the widest possible audience.
In our previous article about Database migrations we explained why you should treat your databases with the same respect as your application source code. Database migrations should be fully automated and handled in a similar manner to applications (including history, rollbacks, traceability etc).
Most modern infrastructure architectures are complex to deploy, involving many parts. Despite the benefits of automation, many teams still chose to configure their architecture manually, carried out by a deployment expert or, in some cases, teams of deployment engineers. Manual configurations open up the door for human error. While DevOps is very useful in developing and deploying software, using Git combined with CI/CD is useful beyond the world of software engineering.
Kubernetes has become the backbone of modern container orchestration, enabling seamless deployment and management of containerized applications. However, as applications grow in complexity, so do the challenges of managing their Kubernetes infrastructure. Enter cdk8s, a revolutionary toolset that transforms Kubernetes configuration into a developer-friendly experience.
Discover Cloudsmith Navigator: a revolutionary tool designed to guide software engineering teams in selecting top-quality open source packages. By analyzing and scoring thousands of packages based on security, maintenance, and documentation, Navigator simplifies the package selection process. Choosing the right software package for your project can sometimes feel like finding a needle in a haystack.
At Circle, our traditional approach to Kubernetes (k8s) deployments likely looks familiar to many of you: Run the workflow, create the image, build the Helm chart and deliver it to k8s. At that point, k8s takes over with its rolling update. This method gets the job done, but we knew it wasn’t ideal. Limited support for canary releases and the need for time-consuming error monitoring and manual rollbacks added friction and risk to our release processes.
In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, where software development and deployment happen at lightning speed, DevOps has emerged as the key to achieving operational excellence and maintaining a competitive edge. DevOps is more than just a buzzword; it’s a culture, a set of practices, and a collection of powerful tools that streamline collaboration between development and operations teams.
Alan Carson writes about his experience and journey with Cloudsmith, as new CEO Glenn Weinstein steps in as leadership. I heard something recently, that resonated, about success. In a simple (but not easy) three-step plan; success happens when the following three things align: A great example is, of course, Steve Jobs and Apple. The contrarian idea was that every single human would need a personal computer. He was proven right. And he executed expertly (with a few ups and downs obviously!)
For many software engineering teams, most testing is done in their CI/CD pipeline. New deployments run through a gauntlet of unit tests, integration tests, and even performance tests to ensure quality. However, there's one key test type that's excluded from this list, and it's one that can have a critical impact on your application and your organization: reliability tests. As software changes, reliability risks get introduced.
Starting with Argo CD 2.4, creating config management plugins or CMPs via configmap has been deprecated, with support fully removed in Argo CD 2.8. While many folks have been using their own config management plugins to do things like `kustomize –enable-helm`, or specify specific version of Helm, etc – most of these seem to have not noticed the old way of doing things has been removed until just now!
Containers and microservices have revolutionized the way applications are deployed on the cloud. Since its launch in 2014, Kubernetes has become a de-facto standard as a container orchestration tool. Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes that makes it easy to install and manage applications on your Kubernetes cluster. One of the benefits of using Helm is that it allows you to package all of the components required to run an application into a single, versioned artifact called a Helm chart.
In the ever-evolving landscape of software development, where agility and reliability are paramount, Kubernetes has emerged as a game-changer with its container orchestration capabilities. However, as applications become more complex and distributed, managing Kubernetes workflows presents a unique set of challenges.
Learn all about how Cloudsmith ensures robust cloud-native software artifact management, emphasizing authentication, license compliance, and vulnerability mitigation, all while maintaining a holistic approach to security.
How do companies actually use Azure DevOps? What are the use cases? We took a look at how the team at SquaredUp uses Azure DevOps to build their CI/CD pipelines and deploy new features to their SaaS product.
Argo Rollouts is a Kubernetes controller that allows you to perform advanced deployment methods in a Kubernetes cluster. We have already covered several usage scenarios in the past, such as blue/green deployments and canaries. The Codefresh deployment platform also has native support for Argo Rollouts and even comes with UI support for them.
