Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

October 2023

Migrating from Travis to Github Actions

For CFEngine we manage several public and private repositories of code in GitHub for our Open Source and Enterprise products. In order to ensure quality we run many checks on the code both with nightly builds as well as on each pull request. We use a Jenkins server for nightlies which also includes more extensive deployment tests on all of the platforms we support. Previously we had used Travis for many of these checks but that system started to show its age and limitations.

Key Principles of Successful DevOps Implementation

Software development, DevOps has emerged as a game-changer. It’s not just a buzzword; it’s a cultural and technological shift that allows organizations to accelerate their software delivery while maintaining high quality and reliability. However, successful DevOps implementation is not merely about adopting a set of tools or following a predefined set of rules. It’s a holistic approach that requires a deep understanding of key principles.

2023 State of DevOps Report Takeaways

Don: The debate is over - how should you structure your software teams? That question is now answered in this year's State of DevOps report 2023. Other questions answered include: How does AI affect my company and team performance? How can we quantify the impact of culture on performance burnout? What even is culture in the first place? All these things are included in the State of DevOps report 2023. We have a very special guest, Eric Maxwell from the DORA group, to offer his takes on the report.

The Dangers Lurking in Open Source Software

Our 1st blog in our series on securely consuming OSS. Today, I'll give an overview of some of the most common types of attacks from consuming OSS. Open-source software (OSS) fuels innovation. Over 96% of commercial applications rely on at least one OSS component (Synopsys, 2023). At Cloudsmith, we champion OSS and understand its indispensable role in today's software landscape. However, the escalating threat of supply chain attacks targeting OSS demands a robust defence.

What is Continuous Delivery? The Benefits of a Well-Tuned Continuous Delivery Software Pipeline

What is continuous delivery? And what are the benefits of the continuous delivery pipeline? This strategy has evolved in a world where platform engineering is on the rise and more and more organizations rely on automation through code to achieve their goals. Times have changed. Most organizations now rely on continuous delivery as an essential part of their development pipelines.

Introducing enhanced webhook security

We are excited to announce webhook secrets, a powerful new feature that will provide an extra layer of security for your webhook payloads in Bitbucket Cloud. With the ability to add secrets to webhooks, you can now sign webhook payloads to ensure they are coming from Bitbucket Cloud and protect against unauthorized access.

Testing GenAI: How to approach nondeterministic software development

Michael Webster, principal engineer at CircleCI, talks to Rob about testing AI-enabled applications. In this episode, learn how to face the unique challenges posed by the probabilistic and non-deterministic nature of AI output, as well as the importance of subjective evaluation criteria. Webster covers how model graded evals can be used to test AI applications, and the importance of caution in using this approach.

Don't just build a dashboard! A DORA cautionary tale

Don't just build a dashboard! A DORA cautionary tale. Software delivery success isn't just about dashboards and metrics. You also need to think about how to improve as an engineering team. The point of the DevOps Research Assessment (DORA) is improvement. Give Sleuth a try and see how we give teams actionable insights on how to improve, no-code automations to instantly ship improvements, and metrics to measure their impact — all in a way that both managers and developers love.

Simplifying Kubernetes Native Testing with TestKube

As Kubernetes continues to dominate the container orchestration landscape, ensuring the reliability and stability of applications running on this platform is paramount. Testing in a Kubernetes-native environment demands specialized tools that understand the intricacies of containerized deployments. Enter TestKube, a powerful testing framework designed specifically for Kubernetes.

The Power of Automation in DevOps

In the ever-evolving world of software development and operations, DevOps has emerged as a game-changer. DevOps, short for Development and Operations, is a set of practices and principles that bridge the gap between these two traditionally siloed domains, fostering collaboration and accelerating the delivery of high-quality software. At the heart of DevOps lies automation, a powerful force that revolutionizes the way software is developed, tested, and deployed.

How to test a MongoDB NoSQL database

Most development teams know that testing the application layer of a system (a.k.a the codebase) is of vital importance. Testing the data layer (the database) is just as important. To perform database testing, you construct queries to assert and validate the database operations, structures, and attributes required by the application connecting to the database.

3 Ways to Sell DORA to Your Boss

3 Ways to Sell DORA to Your Boss. If you've bought into the concept of DORA, and now it's time to get your boss on board, these three tips will help you succeed. Just remember: Give Sleuth a try and see how we give teams actionable insights on how to improve, no-code automations to instantly ship improvements, and metrics to measure their impact — all in a way that both managers and developers love.

400x deploy frequency? One team's DORA success

Is 400x deploy frequency possible? One team achieved it with the DORA philosophy and metrics. It doesn't happen overnight, but it's possible if you commit to it. Nathen Harvey shares a DORA success story. Give Sleuth a try and see how we give teams actionable insights on how to improve, no-code automations to instantly ship improvements, and metrics to measure their impact — all in a way that both managers and developers love.

Securely Connect Cloudsmith to your CI/CD using OIDC Authentication

Are your CI/CD pipelines at risk? They might be if you use long-lived, static credentials and tokens. Long-lived, static credentials and tokens are one of the most common causes of data breaches in cloud environments. CI/CD tools need access to cloud services to publish artifacts, deploy software, and access resources on their cloud provider. So, they need credentials. It's tempting to hard-code them. But that's a bad idea.

Partner Watch: CI/CD Build Systems for Embedded Development

To excel in embedded development in 2023, it is essential to have a solid understanding of build systems, continuous integration, and deployment strategies. This workshop by Percepio training partner Jacob Beningo aims to provide a comprehensive primer on these practices, equipping participants with the knowledge and skills necessary to tackle complex firmware projects with confidence.

GenAI in production: how we built AI into CircleCI

In this episode, you’ll learn how to empower your team to do the most challenging thing when it comes to AI - getting started! Rob is joined by Kira Muehlbauer and Ryan Hamilton, two engineers who worked on building a groundbreaking feature at CircleCI called the AI error summarizer. Discover their insights into the process of building AI products, the challenges they faced, and the valuable lessons they learned along the way.

The Evolution of DevOps From Concept to Best Practice

Software development, the evolution of DevOps has been nothing short of revolutionary. What began as a simple concept has transformed into a best practice that is reshaping the way organisations develop, deploy, and maintain their software. In this blog post, we will take a journey through the evolution of DevOps, from its humble beginnings to its current status as an indispensable part of modern software development.

DORA for measuring developers? Beware!

Should you use DORA for measuring developers? Beware! It could lead to unhealthy behaviors that harm the team and organization. DORA metrics are meant to assess application or service-level health and stability, which cross-functional teams, not individual developers, are responsible for. Give Sleuth a try and see how we give teams actionable insights on how to improve, no-code automations to instantly ship improvements, and metrics to measure their impact — all in a way that both managers and developers love.

Automate deployment of Java Spring Boot apps to AWS Elastic Beanstalk

The benefits of automating deployments for your Java Spring Boot application are undoubtable. Not only is it possible to set up images and run tests or compatibility checks before updating the production environment, but CI/CD providers like CircleCI take a step further by streamlining the entire delivery process from code changes to deployment. Many teams assume that the specifics of their development stack or deployment process will make automation difficult to achieve.

Do these 5 things to get started with DORA

Do these 5 things to get started with DORA. If you're sold on the philosophy of DORA but don't know how to get started, follow our five tips: Give Sleuth a try and see how we give teams actionable insights on how to improve, no-code automations to instantly ship improvements, and metrics to measure their impact — all in a way that both managers and developers love.

Continuous integration for Yii2 APIs with Codeception

Continuous integration (CI) is the process of integrating changes from multiple contributors to create a single software project. A key component for a smooth CI pipeline is testing. Tests prove that the code does exactly what it says on the tin and that it’s safe to merge the code into the central repository. Tests also anticipate edge cases and ensure that the code handles such cases in a deterministic manner.

Bridging the ITIL vs DevOps Mindset: CI/CD Best Practices for ITIL Organizations

DevOps practices in software development have revolutionized the way updates are released. However, many companies entrenched in ITIL practices find it challenging to seamlessly integrate with the DevOps practice of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery/Deployment (CI/CD). This is because ITIL focuses on stability, which suits older systems, while DevOps is ideal for modern setups with its agile, automated practices.

Re-Imagining Cloudsmith.io

When a headhunter reached out to me about the CEO role at Cloudsmith (where I started in August!), one of the first things I did was sign up for a trial account. The product's depth and sophistication really impressed me, and contributed to my decision to go ahead with the interviews. (Glad I did.) They were right; our web interface is still largely a Django web app, tightly coupled to the back end, and you can see the Bootstrap showing everywhere.

DORA myth debunked: You ARE ready for the metrics

DORA myth debunked: You ARE ready for the metrics. Even if your software development team doesn't deploy that frequently, you can still benefit from tracking DORA metrics, because they help teams focus on improving their software delivery performance. Give Sleuth a try and see how we give teams actionable insights on how to improve, no-code automations to instantly ship improvements, and metrics to measure their impact — all in a way that both managers and developers love.

Using Helm and Terraform for Codefresh Gitops Installations

Last year we launched the Codefresh delivery platform powered by Argo. After the initial launch we started collecting feedback from all companies that tried it (as well as existing customers) and cataloged all feature requests and implementation ideas. The main goal is always to iterate quickly and address the most common issues in the most efficient way possible.

Atlassian Intelligence features for Bitbucket Cloud are now in beta!

We're excited to announce that Atlassian Intelligence features are now in beta and are available to all workspace admins to activate in their workspace settings. Generative AI in the editor lets you generate, transform, and summarize content while you're writing Pull Request descriptions or comments in the Bitbucket Cloud code review experience.

Testing a Spring Boot API with SpringBootTest and CircleCI

When it comes to building and delivering modern web applications, the importance of continuous integration cannot be overemphasized. With the rapid pace of software development, ensuring that every change in your codebase is thoroughly tested and seamlessly integrated into your project is essential for maintaining a robust and dependable application.

Multi-Service Progressive Delivery with Argo Rollouts

In the previous article of the series, we explained how to use Configmap generators in order to use Progressive Delivery for your configuration (and not just the container images). In this post, we will also cover another popular question: how to use Argo Rollouts with multiple services. Argo Rollouts is a Kubernetes controller that allows you to perform advanced deployment methods in a Kubernetes cluster. By default, it only supports a single service/application.

Is this key finding from DORA Report 2023 holding back your team?

What's a key finding from the 2023 State of DevOps report? Nathen Harvey shared with us that teams' change review time is holding back their software delivery performance. You can use the DORA metrics to alleviate this bottleneck. Give Sleuth a try and see how we give teams actionable insights on how to improve, no-code automations to instantly ship improvements, and metrics to measure their impact — all in a way that both managers and developers love.
Sponsored Post

Better CI/CD with GitHub Actions and deployment tracking

Understanding the impact of each of your deployments is crucial, especially as they become increasingly frequent. Chances are, your team is either aiming to increase shipping velocity or has already started deploying "continuously" (which is to say, multiple times a day). The biggest tech teams at the likes of Amazon and Google deploy thousands of times daily, and Atlassian has found that 75% of enterprise DevOps teams call deployment frequency their most important success criteria. And while CD comes with a host of well-established benefits, it also introduces a heightened risk of introducing new errors and issues.

Top DevOps Experts offer Key Insights at swampUP

With five keynotes and 15 breakout sessions in one day, there was no shortage of important industry knowledge and key insights from this year’s JFrog swampUP DevOps and DevSecOps user conference. Presenters discussed the role of DevOps at Netflix, how Fidelity migrated to the Cloud, the trend of shifting further left than left, and more. In this post we highlight the three presentations below that challenged attendees to rethink the status quo and reassess their own DevOps and security practices.

Kubernetes Autoscaling for Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment

Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD), the ability to adapt swiftly to fluctuating workloads is paramount. Kubernetes, with its dynamic orchestration capabilities, offers an invaluable toolset for achieving seamless scalability. This article explores the concept of Kubernetes autoscaling and its pivotal role in optimising CI/CD pipelines.