Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

July 2021

Featured Post

How You Can Make Your Database More Efficient

Data is the lifeblood of your business, critical to its survival and success. It delivers insights into customers' specific needs, helping you better understand them and deliver a more tailored user experience. With data playing such a key role in whether modern businesses sink or swim, it's vitally important to optimize your database to ensure data is insightful, relevant, and actionable, providing the end user with the best possible experience.

Monitor AWS FSx audit logs with Datadog

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server is a fully managed file storage service built on Windows Server. Migrating on-premise Windows file systems to a managed service like FSx enables organizations to reduce operational overhead and take advantage of the flexibility and scalability of the cloud. But having visibility into file access activity across their environment is key for security and compliance requirements, particularly in sectors such as financial services and healthcare.

Introducing Redgate's flexible-hybrid working model

The world of work has changed dramatically over the last year and, at Redgate, we’ve been reflecting on what this might mean for our business, and the ways that we work together in the future. From 2022 onwards, we’re aiming to offer Redgate staff a flexible-hybrid working model across our global organization.

CircleCI Server 3.1 Demo | Server Metrics, Backup & Restore plus Runners

Learn how to use server metrics, backup and restore, and CircleCI runners on server 3.1. The latest version of server is designed to meet the strictest security, compliance, and regulatory restraints. This self-hosted solution offers the ability to scale under load and run multiple services at once, all within a team's Kubernetes cluster and network with the full CircleCI cloud experience.

How to sell your manager on CI/CD

Continuous integration seems like a smart choice, right? Why would anyone think that integrating your code into the product as soon as possible is a bad idea? Let me take you back to August 2000, when a fresh-faced young engineer was starting her first engineering role. She was given a desk, a computer, and a detailed project plan that included a release date three months in the future.

Continuous integration for Rust applications

Rust is a powerful language built on the promise of performance and reliability. With no runtime or garbage collector, it easily runs in any environment and can be integrated into any existing language or framework. With the advent of WebAssembly . Rust has become even more valued in the web development space. Rust’s seamless peering with Node.js to build highly performant functionalities has made it a delight for web developers.

Automate your releases with CircleCI and the GitHub CLI orb

Last year, GitHub announced the release of their new CLI tool . The new gh CLI wraps around the standard git cli and offers a suite of additional GitHub.com specific commands. These new commands include the ability to create a new pull request and to create a release directly from your terminal. We here on the CircleCI Community and Partner Engineering team at CircleCI use the gh pr checkout command all the time to safely test pull requests from the community (you!) on our various orbs .

Bring Xray Out of the Box with Dependency and Binary Scanning

Shifting left security means you, the developer, catching and fixing vulnerabilities and license violations early in the SDLC. That’s why Xray scans binaries pushed to Artifactory by your builds, and alerts you when there are issues with your dependencies. But catching them earlier, even before checking in code, can be important for developers shifting left.

How To Create A Cloud Center Of Excellence (CCOE)

Establishing a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE) is an important milestone in every company’s cloud computing journey. While it is usually not the first milestone — which is focused on delivering value to customers — this milestone is reached as the company grows and scales. Turning ad-hoc cloud initiatives into a company-wide strategy, the CCOE helps the business to manage the cloud process and adopt best practices.

SQL Made Simple for vSphere-powered Data Centers

Today we’re announcing a new feature of VMware Tanzu SQL called Data Management for VMware Tanzu. It offers a convenient user interface that simplifies the operation, automation, and scalability of Tanzu SQL databases (Postgres and MySQL); this same convenience is also available from a comprehensive set of APIs.

GitOps with Argo and Crossplane - Civo Online Meetup #10

Join Viktor Farcic and Anais Urlichs in this meetup as we will explore Crossplane through the Civo Crossplane Provider. We will showcase how to create Civo Kubernetes clusters through the Civo Crossplane Provider, we will look at GitOps best practices to manage all of your resources in Kubernetes, and lastly we will provide an overview on how you can take GitOps deployments to the next level with ArgoCD.

Webinar: How to Survive in The Ever-Changing IT World

Today's IT world is changing extremely rapidly in terms of technologies used, hardware and software lifecycle management, trends and hypes. All companies within the industry strive to keep pace with these changes – ensure their software is using up to date technologies and finding the best talent experienced with modern technologies. You need to adapt pretty fast so that you can survive.

Kubernetes 1.22 - What's new?

This release brings 56 enhancements, an increase from 50 in Kubernetes 1.21 and 43 in Kubernetes 1.20. Of those 56 enhancements, 13 are graduating to Stable, a whopping 24 are existing features that keep improving, and 16 are completely new. It’s great to see so many new features focusing on security, like the replacement for the Pod Security Policies, a rootless mode, and enabling Seccomp by default. Also, watch out for all the deprecations and removals in this version!

Most frequently asked questions surrounding Google's Cloud Operations Sandbox

Cloud Operations Sandbox serves as a simulation tool for budding SREs to learn the best practices from Google and apply them to real cloud services. In this blog, we have compiled a list of FAQs surrounding the use of Google's Cloud Operations Sandbox. The Google SRE sandbox provides an easy way to get started with the core skills you need to become a SRE.

How to Use Cargo Repositories in Artifactory

For five years running, Rust has taken the top spot in Stackoverflow’s survey of most loved programming languages. Seen by many as the next step after C/C++, the language is fast becoming embraced by embedded device developers and as a robust system for IoT. At JFrog, we took notice and are eager to welcome Rust developers to the empowerment of robust binaries management and how it contributes to continuous integration.

JFrog detects malicious PyPI packages stealing credit cards and injecting code

Software package repositories are becoming a popular target for supply chain attacks. Recently, there has been news about malware attacks on popular repositories like npm, PyPI, and RubyGems. Developers are blindly trusting repositories and installing packages from these sources, assuming they are secure.

Unlocking New Possibilities with CloudHedge and IBM Edge Computing

Edge computing is gaining huge momentum lately, and with the onset of 5G, the opportunities are endless. Moreover, it ensures or brings computation and data storage closer to where the data is generated, further enables better control, reduces costs, provides faster and actionable insights, and supports continuous operations. In fact, by 2025, 75% of enterprise data will be processed at the edge, compared to only 10% today, as predicted by Gartner.

Announcing the GA of the LogDNA Configuration API and LogDNA Terraform Provider

We’re excited to announce that our Configuration API and Terraform Provider are now generally available for all LogDNA customers. We received tremendous feedback from our public beta release and, based on that feedback, we are enabling several new features with the GA release that allow for more programmatic workflows with LogDNA. First, we are enabling Preset Alerts as a new resource that can be configured with the configuration API as well as within Terraform.

Use Datadog Session Replay to view real-time user journeys

When developing large, customer-facing applications, it’s paramount to have visibility into real user behavior in order to optimize your UX. Without a direct view into what users are actually doing when navigating your app, it can be difficult to reproduce bugs and understand how aspects of your frontend design are causing user frustration and churn. With Datadog RUM’s Session Replay feature, currently available in beta, you can watch individual user sessions using a video-like interface.

How Redox quickly identify and resolve database performance issues

In the IT team at Redox, I wear two hats: Software Development Manager and DBA. I’m the only DBA in the team, so if anything goes wrong it’s my job to identify and fix it. As you might imagine, this can be challenging when being a DBA isn’t your full-time role. Based in Sydney, Redox is one of the leading chemical and ingredients distributors in the world, with over 350 employees across our locations in Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, and the US.

Quick Kubeflow Pipelines with KALE, ElasticSearch and Ceph

KALE allows you to annotate your Jupiter notebooks on Kubeflow and magically compile and run Kubeflow Pipelines. In this demo, Aymen Frikha from Canonical shows how to deploy and run Kubeflow alongside ElasticSearch and Ceph, and how to quickly run a pipeline directly from a Jupyter notebook, using KALE (Kubeflow Automated pipeLines Engine).

The Quick and Easy Guide to Reformatting Code in IntelliJ

As a developer, you’re going to be making changes to a codebase. That’s why, as Harold Abelson put it, “Programs must be written for people to read.” If a codebase is not clearly formatted, debugging becomes more difficult than it should be. Though usually overlooked, little changes like reformatting and proper indentation of your code can obviously differentiate a professional developer’s code base from someone just learning.

SysAdmin Day 2021: You Are Enough

A year ago, in July of 2020, I started my SysAdmin Day post  with the words, Here we are, 12 months later, and a lot has changed, but life (and tech) continue to be extraordinarily not-normal. The challenges we face as IT pros in general and SysAdmins in particular push us to our limits daily, and there’s no hiding or sugar-coating it. In the face of all this, I’d like to offer some new thoughts for my SysAdmin family to help process the year that was and navigate the challenges to come.

JFrog and Vdoo: Better Together

JFrog customers will soon enjoy end-to-end, holistic security across their software lifecycle — from development to devices — as the technology of recently-acquired Vdoo gets integrated into the JFrog DevOps Platform. That was the pledge made by JFrog and Vdoo leaders during their first joint webinar, in which they explained why JFrog acquired Vdoo, how the platform’s security and compliance capabilities will expand, and what’s the integration timeline.

Test internal applications with Datadog's testing tunnel and private locations

As part of your monitoring and testing strategy, you may run tests on different types of applications that are not publicly available—from local versions of production-level websites to internal applications that directly support your employees. Testing each one requires leveraging tools that allow you to verify functionality across a wide range of devices, browsers, and workflows while maintaining a secure environment.

Monitor your CI pipelines and tests with Datadog CI Visibility

Datadog CI Visibility, now available in beta, provides critical visibility into your organization’s CI/CD workflows. CI Visibility complements Datadog’s turn-key CI provider integrations and the integration of synthetic tests in CI pipelines to give you deep insight into key pipeline metrics and help you identify issues with your builds and testing.

Podcast: Break Things on Purpose | Paul Marsicovetere, Senior Cloud Infrastructure Engineer at Formidable

Break Things on Purpose is a podcast for all-things Chaos Engineering. In this episode of the Break Things on Purpose podcast, we speak with Paul Marsicovetere, Senior Cloud Infrastructure Engineer at Formidable.

Reliability Matters. Blameless is Growing with Series B $30M Funding

When Blameless started in 2018, the team set out on a mission to help all engineers achieve reliability with less toil and risk. Three years in, that mission has become more important than ever. What has changed is the rate of SRE adoption, now the fastest growing team and practice inside engineering. This represents a clear recognition of the many upsides that an SRE practice brings with its combination of continuous learning, velocity, and resilience.

5 Ways to Get Valuable Insight From Your AWS Bill

Did you know that Virtana Optimize’s Bill Analysis tool shows you not just the services currently monitored by Virtana but all services to deliver an overall view of your AWS cost? And if you’ve set up and configured consolidated billing to link multiple AWS accounts, you can include data from all those accounts in that view. You can even add multiple billing orgs to the same Virtana Optimize account.

Getting Started with kapp

In this video Tiffany Jernigan (twitter.com/tiffanyfayj) talks about the Carvel toolset tool, kapp. kapp (part of the open source Carvel suite) is a lightweight application-centric tool for deploying resources on Kubernetes. Being both explicit and application-centric it provides an easier way to deploy and view all resources created together regardless of what namespace they’re in. Being dependency-aware, it is able to wait for resources to be created, updated, or deleted, and provides a live status on the progress of the actions. Continue on to see how to get started with kapp.

Tanzu Tuesdays 62 - Monitoring Avail. w/Error Budget Burn Rate on Tanzu Observability w/Amber Salome

Starting in April of 2020 my team was tasked with managing Tanzu Application Service on multiple foundations for a client. Early on it was a priority to establish a strong SRE practice around managing the platform. This talk discusses how we defined key metrics for monitoring availability, custom solutions for populating availability data into an observability platform (Tanzu Observability by Wavefront), dashboard creating, and alerting practices. We discuss in depth the benefits of using a burn rate when monitoring availability error budget consumption, and how this strategy allows for more sensitive alerting and limiting error budget consumption.

How Converting to YAML Build Pipelines Can Help Engineering Teams Be More Efficient

Engineering teams can only be as efficient as the processes they employ during development. The need for increased efficiency is why software development has shifted from the “waterfall” approach to a more responsive, agile methodology. In an agile development environment, quality software can be delivered consistently to suit the ever-changing needs of stakeholders and end users.

Server Performance Guide: Key Metrics and How to Optimize

Everybody hates it when they have to wait for an application to load—or when an application doesn’t load at all. And if this happens with your application, you’re not just losing business but also losing brand value. Most applications today are online. So servers play a crucial role in keeping applications up and running. Application performance is directly proportional to server performance. Hence, it’s very important to monitor and improve server performance.

BizTalk Migrator: What is new and what is coming (June 2021 Edition)

BizTalk Migrator tool is one of the latest releases of Microsoft, which helps to migrate your BizTalk solutions to Azure in a much simpler and automated way. So to keep you informed about the recent enhancements of the tool, the Azure Logic Apps team had a live remote session exclusively on that topic. Without any further delay, let us jump in as there are tons of updates are waiting.

AWS EC2 Service Discovery with HAProxy

AWS Auto Scaling groups are a powerful tool for creating scaling plans for your application. They let you dynamically create a group of EC2 instances that will maintain a consistent and predictable level of service. HAProxy’s Data Plane API adds a cloud-native method known as Service Discovery to add or remove these instances within a backend in your proxy as scaling events occur. In this article, we’ll take a look at the steps used to integrate this functionality into your workflow.

Clojure microservices for JavaScript developers part 2

This series was co-written by Musa Barighzaai and Tyler Sullberg. In the previous post, we explored high-level differences between thinking in Clojure compared to thinking in JavaScript. We are now ready to start building our first Clojure microservice. The microservice we are going to build will be very simple. It will be an HTTP server that uses a Redis data store to count how many times a given IP address has pinged the /counter endpoint.

Clojure microservices for JavaScript developers part 3

This series was co-written by Tyler Sullberg and Musa Barighzaai. This is the third and final post in a series of posts for JavaScript developers about how to set up Clojure microservices. The previous posts were: Those previous posts are useful context, but you can clone the repo and jump into this post without reading them.

"Accelerate" your team with Sleuth

The larger your team grows and the faster your teams move, the harder it is for engineering leaders to find trust but verify moments, the moments where you should dig in and make sure your team's health is improving. Imagine a world where all your engineering tools are working together such that accurate and insightful trust but verify moments come to you. Imagine a world where you have the finest Sleuth in the world, working just for you.

The 15 Best CFO Tools For Managing Software Financials

As businesses evolve thanks to technology advances, so must the role of the Chief Financial Officer (CFO). With an ever-growing list of financials to manage, such as payroll, operating expenses, IT and software expenses, and more, CFOs have to find the right processes and choose the right tools to get the cost data they need to make informed decisions and ensure profitability for their company.

How To - Push Device Configuration Changes

Fastest time-to-value and lowest TCO (total cost of ownership) are among the top 10 reasons that customers choose, love and continue using Netreo. Turning time-consuming administrative projects into simple tasks is one way Netreo consistently delivers superior value. But like all software solutions in use today, many Netreo features go unused or misunderstood by too many customers and would-be users.

Switching service providers? Yes, you can! - Ayyeka success story

Ayyeka connects decision makers to their remote assets, so they can make better and timely decisions. Their Industrial IoT solutions for remote monitoring enable asset owners and operators to achieve enhanced compliance and improved efficiency across the board. Hardware, software, and digital services are merged to deliver an end-to-end experience and value when connecting asset and infrastructure networks to data systems.

Supporting Azure Shared Image Gallery with Elastigroup

Images are one of the most basic, common attributes for your virtual machines (VMs), and contain the operating system which may be customized with specific installations and features. It is necessary to keep VM images organized and structured so that they are easily maintained, managed, and are accessible. Azure introduced their Shared Image Gallery to help solve this, giving users a way to manage, share and distribute custom images.

Accelerating Machine Learning with MLOps and FuseML: Part One

Building successful machine learning (ML) production systems requires a specialized re-interpretation of the traditional DevOps culture and methodologies. MLOps, short for machine learning operations, is a relatively new engineering discipline and a set of practices meant to improve the collaboration and communication between the various roles and teams that together manage the end-to-end lifecycle of machine learning projects.

Microservices Are 'Easy', Dependencies Are Hard - Itiel Shwartz (at Yalla DevOps 2021)

Yalla! DevOps 2021 -- The first, in-person DevOps conference of the year! Driven by the DevOps community. All about the DevOps community. Microservices Are ‘Easy’, Dependencies Are Hard: The Right Way to Build a Cloud-Native CI/CD Microservices are more agile, easier to test, and simpler to maintain. If you don’t know, now you know. Thanks to k8s, it’s so easy! In fact, it is so easy, we’re gradually scaling down to smaller and smaller services. Sounds like there’s no downside at all. Or is there? In this talk, Itiel describes the many pitfalls of microservices, and how to avoid them.

AI in Construction and Architecture Industry: [With Real World Use Cases]

Globally the impact of AI is increasingly growing year on year in every industry sector. Opening new scopes in construction & architecture sector, the global AImarket is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 29.4% (around) from 2019 to 2026 and is expected to reach around US$ 2.1 Billion by 2026.

Gaining a real competitive edge in managed services

These are interesting – and challenging – times to be a Managed Service Provider. When it first published its Managed Services Market Size Forecast, Mordor Intelligence valued the market at US$152 billion in 2020, and predicted it to reach US$274 billion by 2026, a compound annual growth rate of 11.2%. Over a year later, following a pandemic which has changed the way most of us work and which will probably see permanent changes going forward, Mordor is sticking by its prediction.

Clojure microservices for JavaScript developers

This series was co-written by Tyler Sullberg and Musa Barighzaai. CircleCI is growing, which is wonderful. However, one of the growth challenges we have is that our backend is primarily written in Clojure, and few developers know Clojure. Many CircleCI engineers, including myself, have learned Clojure on the job. Before joining CircleCI, I was a JavaScript developer. As the lingua franca of software engineers, JavaScript is a relatively straightforward language to learn.

High-availability connectivity for Kubernetes with dual ToR

Dual ToR (top of rack) peering provides a redundant path for customers with cluster applications that cannot tolerate service downtime or failure and require a high-availability solution. While Calico ToR connectivity has existed for some time, Calico Enterprise now supports connectivity with dual ToR switches.

Powerful Time-Based Automation Rules to Move You From Reactive to Proactive

Unattended incidents won’t clean up after themselves and will come back to haunt you—whether as rising MTTR metrics, a cluttered Incident Index, fruitless back-and-forth communication, or a declining CSAT score. Powerful automation conditions can drive productivity, save you manual work, and speed up your incident lifecycle management —and keep your employees happy.
Featured Post

The New Normal for Hybrid IT Solutions

The more things change, the more things stay the same. An idiom that's oddly comforting in its assurance that everything will remain balanced and undisrupted, and the winds of change-however ferocious-are somehow futile against the staunchness of the status quo. That said, I would suggest the creator of this idiom hadn't experienced a year like 2020 (and now 2021).

PD Summit21: Adopting and Maturing to Service Ownership with PagerDuty and Rundeck

Among the common goals of today's engineering and operations teams is to adopt a culture of service ownership: ""You build it, you own it."" As with many ancillary objectives to driving DevOps across an organization, this is easier said than done. Sometimes this is in small part due to the technology stack/architecture of a given company. But more often than not, this is because teams lack the human-to-technology mechanisms that allow for a culture of service ownership.

Creating Envoy WebAssembly Extensions

In the CNCF ecosystem, Envoy, an open source service proxy developed by Lyft, is a very common choice in service mesh networking. In a previous post we discussed that both Consul and Istio leverage Envoy. Were you aware that you can extend Envoy’s capabilities with WebAssembly? What is WebAssembly? WebAssembly, or Wasm as it is often abbreviated, is not so much of a programming language as it is a specification for a binary instruction format that can be run in sandboxed virtual machines.

How to encourage DBAs to embrace DevOps, rather than fear change

How do we help Database Administrators (DBAs) embrace DevOps in a way that can be really productive and part of a rich DevOps team that delivers value to customers quickly and continuously? That’s an important question to ask right now because there’s a common view among DBAs that DevOps isn’t for them. They’re responsible for documentation and maintenance and deployments, they have internal customers, and they serve internal requests.

The Confident Commit ep. 7 | Design Your Org Structure for Fast Flow of Change with Matthew Skelton

Rob interviews co-author of Team Topologies and founder of Conflux, Matthew Skelton on how to structure your team for a fast flow of change. Discover the signs, symptoms, and proper metrics that indicate your organization's structure may need a redesign.

Knative - deploy, and manage modern container-based serverless workloads - Elad Hirsch

Yalla! DevOps 2021 -- The first, in-person DevOps conference of the year! Driven by the DevOps community. All about the DevOps community. Knative is the new kid in town in the Serverless community. As Kubernetes is de facto our cloud infrastructure Knative is allowing us to focus more on our business logic and less on infrastructure ,All while committing to the new paradigm of Serverless computing.

GitLab GUI

Has GitKraken made my dev life easy? It’s been 6 months since I started at Pipefy as a Young Gun Tech. During these months, I have learned a lot and used various tools to streamline my work. For this post, I will talk about how I use the GitKraken Git GUI with GitLab, running on Ubuntu, because both tools have an awesome integration. So you can speed up your workflow just like me.

Vdoo & JFrog - Enhanced Security From Code To The Edge

Join this webinar to learn more about JFrog’s announced acquisition of Vdoo! Together JFrog and Vdoo are the creators of a hybrid product security platform that automates multidimensional security tasks throughout the entire build and release cycle - and how JFrog and Vdoo plan to integrate their technologies to further the secure Liquid Software vision. Imagine if you had access to streamlined, consolidated and comprehensive security data in one platform that helped developers and security teams identify and fix their most critical issues rapidly.

What's New: Updates to Event Intelligence, Integrations, and More!

If you thought that the product announcements from PagerDuty’s largest event of the year, PagerDuty Summit 2021, was all we had in store for you, think again! We’re excited to announce that the July Release comes with a new set of updates and enhancements to the PagerDuty platform! You can learn about our latest capabilities via the Q1 PagerDuty Pulse or read below for the highlights.

Cloud Native Runtimes for VMware Tanzu Is Now GA, Plus an Integration with TriggerMesh

Back in March, during our Cloud Transformation event, we released the public beta of Cloud Native Runtimes for VMware Tanzu, which is based on Knative serving and eventing technology. Today, we have a couple of new, exciting announcements to make about Cloud Native Runtimes.

After analyzing 600,000 SQL queries, these are the top mistakes developers make - Oded Valin

Yalla! DevOps 2021 -- The first, in-person DevOps conference of the year! Driven by the DevOps community. All about the DevOps community. Users want to see their data fast, immediately, now. Whether you’re working with an ORM or writing native SQL, you probably had a “scratching-my-head-trying-to-figure-out-why-this-database-is-so-slow” moment. The team at EverSQL analyzed more than 600,000 SQL queries from thousands of different companies, to lay down the most common mistakes developers do when writing SQL queries. This talk focuses on writing SQL the right way, the fast way.

Deep-dive into Open Policy Agent + Conftest + GateKeeper - Shimon Tolts & Noaa Barki

Yalla! DevOps 2021 -- The first, in-person DevOps conference of the year! Driven by the DevOps community. All about the DevOps community. Deep-dive into Open Policy Agent + Conftest + GateKeeper: Kubernetes Policy in action In this session, we will do a deep-dive session into: Open Policy Agent, Conftest, and GateKeeper. We will show real-life use cases of how to use those technologies in production in order to configure and enforce a centralized policy for Kubernetes Shimon and Noaa will present both sides of the dev stack, DevOps and Developers.

What's the Difference between Observability and Monitoring?

Wondering what the difference is between observability and monitoring? In this post, we explain how they are related, why they are important, and some suggested tools that can help. The difference between observability and monitoring is that observability is the ability to understand a system’s state from its outputs, often referred to as understanding the “unknown unknowns”.

Dissecting DevOps - Code-to-Cloud Visibility: The Framework for DevOps Success

Recording from the DevOps.com webinar Code-To-Cloud Visibility where Splunker Chris Riley covers the key concepts to maintain visibility from the point a feature is defined to the point that feature runs in production. Learn about the practices of DevSecOps, Pipeline Analytics, and Observability. And why a Code-To-Cloud strategy is necessary to support and accelerate Cloud and DevOps transformation.

The Race to MEC-anize the Mobile Network

Mobile network operators (MNOs) continue to show confidence in the potential of Multi-Access Edge Compute (MEC) and a more open 5G network. At the same time, they face new challenges working in an open ecosystem. MNOs are uniquely positioned to deliver on the full promise of edge computing with end-to-end applications, public cloud infrastructure and hybrid network deployments. In this webinar, you will learn how MNOs can maximize network investments and unlock new revenue streams by leveraging a combination of analytics, orchestration and MEC applications.

Cloud 66 Feature Highlight: Multi Database Support

Many applications use multiple types of datastores simultaneously - mixing SQL and NoSQL databases, for example. Or your application might need two separate clusters of the same database engine to handle an upgrade, or to support separate services. This is where Multi Database Support comes handy. What is Multi Database Support? Multi Database Support makes it possible to attach more than one database group to your application.

AI Never Sleeps in the Data Center

A data center typically employs between 30-200 people depending on the size and the intended project use. But only a fraction of those folks run the IT side. Besides swapping gear—the infamous “remote hands”—there isn’t much to do as long as there aren’t any outages, and rumor has it a data center is a nice place to sleep—it’s dark, cool, and the deep humming noise can have a pacifying impact on some.

The Peopleware Running Cloud DevOps

Early this year, we set out on a journey to onboard a new cloud engineering team at JFrog. Many can relate to the challenges involved with onboarding a new team, these were amplified even more during the pandemic. However this blog post is not about COVID-19, it is about sharing our experience of fine-tuning the onboarding path for this unbeatable group. TL/DR: What it takes to build and onboard a team of junior engineers into the existing JFrog Cloud engineering team.

Our Workflow for Security Releases using GitHub Security Advisories

We recently started using GitHub Security Advisories as part of our workflow for pushing out security releases. This post will give a brief introduction on how they work, how we use them, some of their limitations, and how we overcome them. We are still experimenting with this workflow, but the information could still be helpful for some while others might have suggestions how we could do things better.

What Is Cloud Orchestration? 8 Tools To Get You Started

Automation in the cloud has a number of benefits that helps you save time and eliminate human error. Cloud automation can help you innovate faster because it frees up your engineering team to focus on innovation — rather than repetitive tasks. It can also help you save money by scaling resources up and down to match your computing needs and budget. But is this actually cloud automation or is it cloud orchestration?

How to test the latest Kubernetes 1.22 release candidate with MicroK8s

Today, the Kubernetes community made the 1.22 release candidate available, a few weeks ahead of general availability, planned for August the 4th. We invite developers, platform engineers and cloud tech enthusiasts to experiment with the new features, report back findings and bugs. MicroK8s is the easiest way to get up and running with the latest version of K8s for testing and experimentation.

How to mitigate DevOps tool sprawl in enterprise organizations

There’s an insidious disease increasingly afflicting DevOps teams. It begins innocuously. A team member suggests adding a new logging tool. The senior dev decides to upgrade the tooling. Then it bites. You’re spending more time navigating between windows than writing code. You’re scared to make an upgrade because it might break the toolchain. The disease is tool sprawl.

Choosing an API technology: gRPC, REST, GraphQL

How do you choose an API style and API technology when you start a new project? Today, if you look at API technology research such as RapidAPI Developer Survey and Insights, you’ll probably conclude that REST is the dominant force in the API landscape. While REST is certainly well-known to most developers and used in a lot of production environments, it may not be the best fit for every scenario.

When Disaster Strikes: Ensuring Your DRP Actually Works

Black swan events are inherently unpredictable—you can’t prepare for every possible threat. Instead, you must identify the ways systems can fail and develop strategies to restore them to full service when these failures happen. But a disaster recovery plan (DRP) can’t be relied on until it’s been proven to work. The use of Chaos Engineering allows you to test your DRP much more safely and predictably than you could otherwise.

SRE's Guide to Chaos & Observability

Today’s distributed, cloud-based environments are incredibly complex. Not only does each component depend on many others, but modern systems are also highly dynamic—changing frequently as teams push new code or make updates to infrastructure. Taming this complexity to ensure reliability requires end-to-end observability to understand how components depend on each other. Additionally, proactive Chaos Engineering combined with AI-driven observability lets you uncover “unknown unknowns” that impact how your system will respond to different failure scenarios.

Building Reliable Applications Webinar 6 17 21

Test-driven development (TDD) is a process that ensures quality in the applications we develop while guarding against feature creep/skew. But as our applications have become increasingly complex, traditional testing methods are not enough. Traditional testing only evaluates what we know, but complex systems often fail due to unknowns—the things that are almost impossible to test because we are unaware of them. Chaos Engineering is the exception that allows us to test for what we don’t know.

Dissecting DevOps - Measuring quality in a SaaS world: SLA, SLI, SLO

Now that software is delivered over the web and not in a box, how developers guarantee quality to their users has radically changed. Users do not care about version numbers or floppy disks. They just want access to a service that just works. In the microservices world, the quality of your service both to your internal users and external is measured by SLAs, SLIs, and SLOs. And how you decide what those metrics are is a key strategy.

GitLab Client for Linux

Working in a DevOps field, I often find myself needing to deliver a feature or an improvement (basically a piece of code) in a relatively short amount of time, or even working in parallel on different tasks. A rather universal software development stack is comprised of: Repository and branch management in Git has never been easier. Get more control over your Git workflow with the visualization offered by GitKraken.

LaunchDarkly Integration: Feature Flag Aware Troubleshooting

Troubleshooting is the understanding of changes within the system and their impact on its health, behavior, and functionality. However, as dev environments grow exponentially more complex, the definition of “the system” itself also constantly expands. To keep pace, we constantly work to evolve Komodor’s platform and enrich it with new capabilities and integrational options.

The Secret to a Successful Hybrid Application Migration

Planning a hybrid application migration? There’s plenty to deal with already, and now your manager wants to know—how are you going to make sure that the migration is a success? The secret is to take a subjective judgment and turn it into an objective one. As you probably know, there is no way that you can guarantee a problem-free migration. Don’t leave it up solely to how your boss or anyone else feels about the migration.

What Is Network Management? A Comprehensive Introduction

Network management is the process that helps you know the working state of your network. It also enables you to fix various discovered or undiscovered network problems. In today’s networks, it’s a complicated exercise to monitor and maintain how well your network is functioning. Network management involves so many different components that you need the right people, technologies, and tools to do it well.

GitOps meets AppOps

Kubernetes allowed us to manage application deployments and infrastructure components using declarative configuration files (yes, those YAMLs that you may not be a fan of ). While dealing with a myriad of YAML files may be loved by some and hated by others, it enables us to host all these files into a Git repository, hook it up to a pipeline (Jenkins, GitLab, etc.), and have a tool apply those changes to a cluster—and voilà, you have GitOps.

3 Real-World Use Cases of Driving Data Center Automation via Integration

Data center managers are increasingly looking for ways to automate tasks to save time and improve data accuracy. In our recent Automation Workshop webinar, data center experts from eBay, MacStadium, and the University of Chicago shared their real-world use cases and insights on how they use APIs and integration to drive automation in their data centers.

Glossary of IT Monitoring and Management Terms

Due to innovations in technology and automation, technology keeps changing and transforming with time. IT monitoring and management is an important aspect of all organizations regardless of their size, location, or workload. When it comes to IT processes, issues and protocols, all concepts are universal and face similar issues everywhere. This IT management terms or IT monitoring terms glossary brings together numerous IT components, issues, protocols and processes.

KUBLR | Enterprise-Grade Kubernetes Management Platform

Kublr is an enterprise-grade Kubernetes management platform. Headquartered in Washington, D.C. and launched in 2016, Kublr automates the deployment and management of production-ready, secure Kubernetes clusters and environments. Kublr allows users to securely and reliably deploy, run, and manage containerized applications at scale. A subsidiary of EastBanc Technologies, Kublr is a proud contributor to the Kubernetes codebase, an active member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and completed the CNCF Kubernetes Software Conformance Certification program.

Why Would You Pay for Flyway?

Flyway is an open-source database deployment tool that also includes a paid tier called Teams. Since it’s open-source, you can just download Flyway and run it for free. You’ll get a robust DevOps tool to assist you in deploying your databases just like you deploy your code. It just works. So, why would you even bother to pay for Teams? Actually, there are a number of reasons why people pay for advanced tiers of open-source software in general.

Why Open Source Histograms Are The Future of Telemetry Monitoring

Latency measurements have become an important part of IT infrastructure and application monitoring. The latencies of a wide variety of events like requests, function calls, garbage collection, disk IO, system-call, CPU scheduling, etc. are of great interest to engineers operating and developing IT systems. But there are a number of technical challenges associated with managing and analyzing latency data.

Data cataloging: A giraffe's eye view

In the latest DBAle podcast episode our hosts, Chris and Chris, tackled what they really mean by cataloging a database and how taking a ‘giraffe’s eye view’ approach to compliance is not enough. That’s because the most common data concerns for managers and execs center around where your sensitive data is, the risk it poses and, if you’re migrating to the cloud, how much sensitive data is being stored on that database or that instance.

How to Accelerate Software Delivery with Hybrid Cloud CI/CD

Are you looking for solutions to deliver rapid application development and iterations? You’re not alone. To accomplish this, many organizations are embracing cloud native containers across multiple cloud providers. The reason? This strategy reduces the risk of vendor lock-in, and helps you scale the application infrastructure horizontally.

What's New With Runbook Automation: Rundeck 3.4.1

Technical teams are under more pressure than ever to move faster, protect revenue and availability, and push mean time to resolve (MTTR) ever lower. However, teams frequently find themselves encumbered by complex, repetitive, and manual tasks, rather than innovating. When urgent incidents arise, organizations often have to wait for specific developers or subject matter experts (SMEs) to deploy a fix.

Modern Tech Stacks need Multi-Format Repositories

At Cloudsmith, using Multi-tenant repositories, we provide a simple and flexible solution to deploy and distribute your software artifacts. Multi-tenant repositories allow you to store artifacts of different formats in the same place. Organize your packages by environment, project, package type, or whatever way you see fit- we are not opinionated about how you organize your packages or containers.

Modern Tech Stacks need Multi-Format Repositories

At Cloudsmith, using Multi-format repositories, we provide a simple and flexible solution to deploy and distribute your software artifacts. Multi-format repositories allow you to store artifacts of different formats in the same place. Organize your packages by environment, project, package type, or whatever way you see fit- we are not opinionated about how you organize your packages or containers.

Cloud Platforms: Comparing AWS, Azure & Google Cloud

A cloud platform can be described as a storage place that is highly accessible, flexible, scalable and agile in all its characteristics. Users from anywhere via the internet can access their data, collaborate, share, and work together in real-time with the cloud, which means anything less than a cloud platform cannot be possible to comprehend today. The substantial dominance of cloud platforms is their authenticity and usability.

Deploy your apps on Scaleway with Qovery! Get early access now

When we launched Qovery in January 2020, our product was only supporting app deployment on Amazon Web Services (AWS). 20 months later, 5534 developers from more than 120 countries use Qovery to deploy their apps on AWS and Digital Ocean. Today, more and more European companies would love to benefits from the excellent user experience of Qovery on a European cloud service provider 🇪🇺.

FIPS certification and CIS compliance with Ubuntu

There are few Linux distributions that undergo the FIPS certification process, and even fewer with certified images available for production use in multi-cloud environments. Canonical has built integrated services to easily enable FIPS certified or compliant modules for Ubuntu 18.04 and 16.04 LTS releases, as well as tooling to assist in hardening and auditing Ubuntu instances to meet CIS compliance benchmarks. These certified components enable operating environments under compliance regimes like FedRAMP, HIPAA, PCI and ISO.

How to Establish a Culture of Secure DevOps

We’re constantly told to “Shift Left” and that Secure DevOps is the only way to have confidence in your cloud native applications. But speaking to end-users and industry colleagues, it’s clear that there are some major challenges in adopting Secure DevOps. If we read our history books, we know that DevOps wasn’t successfully adopted by buying tools, and a true cultural movement towards DevOps wasn’t established by having a small dedicated team of DevOps specialists.

Tips for Choosing the Right CI/CD Tools

CI/CD enables DevOps teams to go from development to production while tackling unexpected glitches. But, choosing the right CI/CD tool is always a challenge. In this blog, we have covered the tips that will help you select the right CI/CD tool for your team. A few years ago, it was nearly impossible to find a software development shop that wasn't deploying their code using some sort of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) tool.

Engineering solutions to security issues

Software engineering teams have always looked for ways to increase code creation efficiency, reduce code vulnerabilities, and improve security processes. Many are now shifting security left, establishing security controls and testing — specifically integration testing — at an earlier phase in the software development lifecycle (SDLC).

Packet Capture Without "tcpdump" for Go Apps in Kubernetes

Every developer knows there are some utilities that are completely indispensable from their workflows. The programmer’s toolbelt, if you will. These toolbelts are usually different from person to person, but if there is one tool that everyone should use or at least know how to use, it is tcpdump. If you are unfamiliar, tcpdump is a tool that allows you to dump and inspect live network traffic being observed on a network interface.

Visualize live dependencies with the Request Flow Map

Modern applications are often composed of countless distributed services, which makes it difficult to understand dependencies, isolate bottlenecks, and remediate errors. Datadog APM helps you tackle this complexity by allowing you to search and analyze 100 percent of your traces in real time. But without a dynamic view of your architecture, it can still be challenging to contextualize a specific request without getting lost in the details.

Resilience, DevSecOps, and other key takeaways from RSAC 2021

For the first time in its 30-year history, the 2021 RSA Conference was a virtual-only event, and not in its usual time during the spring. But, with 20,000 registrants joining for the various sessions, it was a testament to this year’s conference theme of resilience.

A Comprehensive Cloud Migration Checklist

More and more cloud providers are emerging and spreading their business across different regions in the current times. As a result, customers want to reduce their IT workload and migrate their product or application to a cloud-based environment. The primary reason behind this is that the cloud heavily reduces the overheads of investing in IT infrastructure, hardware upgrades, maintenance, etc.

Upcoming trends in DevOps and SRE

DevOps and SRE are domains with rapid growth and frequent innovations. With this blog you can explore the latest trends in DevOps, SRE and stay ahead of the curve. The past decade has seen widespread adoption of DevOps methodologies in software development. Unsurprisingly, as the needs of users change, DevOps techniques have evolved as well. In this blog we will look at the trends that are most likely to have a significant impact in the coming years.

How Traffic Engineering Can Lead to a Smooth Transition to 5G

Communications Service Providers around the world have experienced an unprecedented explosion in demand for bandwidth due to several driving forces including more video streaming, the growing popularity in areas like cloud gaming and the increasing move to the cloud to name a few.

Uncover the optimization potential of your Kubernetes clusters with Ocean Insights

The evolution of Spot’s products has always been tightly aligned with our customers. Over the years, we’ve added integrations across the cloud stack, and developed new features that bring even more efficiency, automation and optimization to cloud infrastructure operations.

Pragmatic Incident Response: 3 Lessons Learned from Failures

In my past experience as an SRE I’ve learned some valuable lessons about how to respond and learn from incidents. Declare and run retros for the small incidents. It's less stressful, and action items become much more actionable. Decrease the time it takes to analyze an incident. You'll remember more, and will learn more from the incident. Alert on pain felt by people — not computers. The only reason we declare incidents at all is because of the people on the other side of them.

Managing reusable pipeline configuration with object parameters

CircleCI pipelines are defined in configuration files using the YAML syntax, which has been widely adopted by many software tools and solutions. YAML is a human-readable declarative data structure commonly used in configuration files and in applications where data is being stored or transmitted. The data in pipeline configuration files specifies and controls how workflows and jobs are executed when triggered on the platform.

Intro to AIOps: Leveraging AI and Machine Learning in DevOps

AIOps is a DevOps strategy that brings the power of machine learning to bear on observability and system management. It’s not surprising that an increasing number of companies are now adopting this approach. AIOps first came onto the scene in 2015 (coincidentally the same year as Coralogix) and has been gaining momentum for the past half-decade. In this post, we’ll talk about what AIOps is, and why a business might want to use it for their log analytics.

Kubernetes in 2021: Where does the industry go next?

Ever since Google made Kubernetes open-source in 2014, it has enjoyed incredible growth, helping businesses of all sizes to successfully manage their containers and ultimately make the most of all that our cloud native world has to offer. Individual users certainly initially led the charge with Kubernetes, identifying issues, and generally exploring the best ways to intelligently test, manage, and deploy workloads.

New 451 Research Says Monitoring Tool Consolidation Has Become a Top Priority

Industry analyst firm 451 Research recently published a Business Impact Brief on how monitoring tool sprawl, which has long been a pervasive problem for large enterprises and government institutions, is creating even more challenges in modern IT environments.

DORA Metrics Explained: the four DORA metrics and how to improve them

DORA metrics come from an organization called DevOps Research and Assessment. This was a team put together by Google to survey thousands of development teams across multiple industries, to try to understand what makes a high performing team different than a low performing team. What they ended up settling on are these four metrics.

Announcing Spot PC: Simple and continuously optimized cloud desktops as a service

Speaking with thousands of organizations adopting cloud computing, it’s clear that the preferred way to consume cloud, from infrastructure to platforms to applications, is “as a service”. Customers want fully managed services, with security and SLAs built in.

Civo reviewed by respected Kubernetes guru Viktor Farcic

A couple of days ago, I was pleasantly surprised to suddenly see a tweet come in from Viktor Farcic. Viktor now works at upbound.io who developed Crossplane, and he also runs his own popular YouTube channel and co-hosts DevOps Paradox podcast. He’s well respected in the cloud native community. When I saw the tweet and noticed that Viktor had recorded a review of Civo on YouTube, I was just hoping he was kind to us...and I am pleased to say he was!

Compare Red Hat OpenShift and D2iQ's Enterprise Kubernetes Solution

As organizations look to adopt Kubernetes, they are being confronted with a growing number of Kubernetes distributions, services, and products to choose from. Navigating the Kubernetes landscape can be incredibly challenging, especially because there is no “one size fits all” solution. To help streamline the process, we compare Red Hat OpenShift and D2iQ Kubernetes Platform (DKP) across the top production-grade capabilities to consider while evaluating an enterprise Kubernetes solution.

Measure your DevSecOps maturity with Datadog's self-assessment

With DevOps teams moving at ever greater speed, it’s vital for security teams to be deeply involved at all stages of the software development and delivery lifecycle. Breaking down silos between development, operations, and security teams ensures that security considerations are not overlooked, that vulnerabilities are caught early, and that security checkpoints do not slow down the delivery process.

GitOps Feature Release

It’s no secret that the software development community is starting to embrace GitOps. With the complexity of engineering modern software today, it is becoming a necessity for many companies to reassess their software development and delivery practices. When Codefresh first released GitOps 2.0 late last year, we had already planned to make it a core pillar of our platform.

Codefresh GitOps Controller

The new Codefresh GitOps dashboard gives you the perfect overview of your deployments and how they change over time. This powerful view combines information from multiple sources such as your Kubernetes services, Git Pull Requests, and JIRA issues. To help you incorporate all of this helpful information into your deployments, we have introduced the GitOps controller, a handy agent that is installed in your cluster and collects critical information about your GitOps deployments.

GitOps Current State Dashboard

At Codefresh, we are fortunate to hear from customers of all sizes and nearly every industry. A common interest is visibility into deployments and their respective environments. As a company filled with software enthusiasts and developers, this strongly resonates with our culture and our passion for empowering developers. Visibility has been an area of continuous improvement for Codefresh and something we are committed to being the best at.

Codefresh GitOps App of Apps

Microservices are powerful, but it isn’t a secret that they come with many challenges. Codefresh is acutely aware of this as we built our platform on microservices. We know what it means to maintain a fast-moving and complex software service that must remain highly available. One of the most common challenges we deal with is maintaining complex relationships at deployment time among individual microservices.

Enabling Single Sign-On with SQL Monitor

It’s never been more critical to protect your data infrastructure against malicious actors, with organizations dealing with an ever-expanding number of increasingly sophisticated attacks. Monitoring solutions represent part of your infrastructure’s attack surface area – they enjoy highly privileged access to the systems they help manage, and store sensitive information about the workloads running on them.

Spotlight: Serverless spark on Kubernetes

With Apache Spark now natively supporting Kubernetes, many of our customers are looking to move big data, ML, AI applications into Kubernetes. To help you along this journey, Spot by NetApp recently launched Wave, a serverless container engine designed specifically for big data applications. Built on the same core technologies as Ocean, Wave is giving big applications automated, scalable and reliable cloud infrastructure.

Spotlight: a look into Predictive rebalancing

Have you ever wondered how Spot identifies and predicts spot instance interruptions so you can run your workloads reliably on them? Advanced, highly trained machine learning algorithms are the foundation of many capabilities our platforms deliver and in this session, we’ll show you how Spot tracks, predicts, and replaces spot instances up to an hour before interruption. If you are considering leveraging spot instances for your production and mission-critical workloads, this session will show how Spot eliminates all the risk of spot instances while delivering all the cost-benefits.

Long-term savings without long-term lock-in

While all cloud providers offer discounted pricing in exchange for 1- or 3-year commitments, these financial arrangements carry the risk of lock-in with potential cloud waste and negative ROI. In this session we’ll highlight best practices for planning, purchasing and managing RI and Savings Plans portfolios and how Spot Eco automates cloud commitment optimization for increased savings and utilization.

What is a Blameless Postmortem?

Do blameless retrospectives (or postmortems) help your team? We will explain what they are, if they really work, and how to do them right. A blameless postmortem (or retrospective) is a post-incident document that helps teams figure out why an incident happened, and brainstorm how to improve the process to prevent similar incidents from happening again. In most engineering organizations, everyone agrees that in complex systems, failure is inevitable.

GitKraken v7.7: Git for Teams

Get ready to collaborate with your team on a whole new level. While Git is amazing at tracking changes over time and giving us insight into the past, it’s not so great at helping you see what changes others are currently making or who is assigned to work on what parts of the code on any given project. Wouldn’t it be great to get better insight into what others on your team are actively working on, without ever switching applications? We could not agree more! Announcing GitKraken v7.7.

Hybrid Cloud Monitoring in Depth

Nowadays, monitoring is very important. Why is that? Because applications become more and more complicated. But not only applications—infrastructure becomes complicated too. Some companies are moving to the cloud; others are building hybrid infrastructure. And if some pieces of infrastructure are in the cloud while others are on-premises, this creates even more unclarity on how to get an overview of the infrastructure as a whole.

The 7 Steps to Creating and Refining a Cloud Migration Strategy

For a successful cloud migration, creating (and later refining), a cloud migration strategy tailored to your organization’s goals, available resources, workloads, and priorities is an absolute necessity. So here, we’ll take a look at a simple list of the areas you’ll need to quantify and understand to build that strategy and then improve it as you move forward through the cloud migration process.

Ubuntu becomes #1 OS for OpenStack deployment

One of the core values of Canonical, that we all identify with, is the mission of bringing the power of open source to everyone on the planet. From developing to developed countries. From individuals to big enterprises. From engineers to CEOs. And there is only one way to find out if we are efficient in what we do. This is community feedback. It is no different this time.

Creating an Azure DevOps CI CD pipeline for AKS

In this hands-on webinar we will learn to set up a CI/CD pipeline to deploy your apps on a Kubernetes cluster with Azure DevOps. Our leading cloud architect Itay Malka, with almost a decade of experience, will illustrate how you can easily set up a CI/CD pipeline and accelerate your DevOps journey with containers.

Save up to 90% on Spinnaker-deployed applications costs using Spot's Elastigroup integration

Spinnaker is an open source multi-cloud continuous delivery platform for releasing software changes with high velocity and confidence. It is a leading CI/CD tool and provides core feature sets for cluster and deployment management. Created by Netflix and Google, it combines a powerful and flexible pipeline management system with integrations to the major cloud providers. As Spinnaker developed new features and integrations, many of Spot by NetApp customers adopted it as part of their DevOps stack.

Why should my business consider private and direct connections to Tencent Cloud?

Tencent Cloud is among a number of Chinese tech giants making an impact in the enterprise cloud sector. In this blog, we look at how businesses can maximise the potential of their Tencent Cloud instance using direct connections through Console Connect.

Boost your skills with Puppet Practice Labs

Puppet products and solutions are designed to make your work day easier—and learning how to use them should be just as easy. That's why we’re excited to launch Puppet Practice Labs—hands-on, always accessible, browser-based tutorials that make it simpler than ever to explore automating and managing your infrastructure and application workflow with Puppet.

Spotlight: The evolution of Spot Ocean - CD for Kubernetes applications

Ocean is rising to the application level bringing Kubernetes-native continuous delivery to containers in the cloud. Spot by NetApp’s new solution, Ocean CD, takes on the most painful aspects of modern application delivery to give developers the freedom to push code fast and with confidence. Get an early preview into Ocean CD and its core features for automated progressive deployments and continous verification.

Environment variables and Secrets for Qovery v2 released

I am super excited to announce that we released the support of Environment Variables and Secrets. Watch the video to see those features in action. Environment Variables and Secrets are similar. The main difference is that the Secrets are encrypted and the value can’t be revealed. Both are injected at the build and runtime of your applications. Give it a try now! Resources: I am eager to have your feedback. Put a comment here. ‍

Self-hosting vs Managed Services: Deciding how to host your database

Like all good things in infrastructure, picking whether or not to self-host your database is full of trade-offs. On the one hand, you have the absolute freedom to do whatever it is you want with your database - whether it's adding a useful Postgres extension, or experimenting with new technologies. On the other hand, you now have to dedicate resources to keeping your database reliably online.

Customer Story: Lacework, Innovating cloud security solutions on kubernetes

The DevOps experts at Lacework, a cloud security and compliance company, were manually managing large Kubernetes cluster themselves. In this session, learn how they went from DIY Kubernetes to automated infrastructure management, freeing their DevOps teams from manual work.

Become a CI/CD expert with live DevOps training courses

At CircleCI, we’ve worked hard to build on-demand training to help our users get the most out of our platform and its capabilities. Historically, we created CircleCI Academy courses to ensure that all our customers know how to effectively use the features on our platform. Today, we’re taking a proactive approach to enhance your DevOps skills.

What Is Amazon ElastiCache? Everything You Should Know

Rolled out in 2011, AWS ElastiCache has grown to become one of the most prominent Amazon services among developers. So much so that in the 2020 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, one of its fully-managed engines was voted by developers as the most loved database. On the flip side, however, AWS ElastiCache happens to be infamous for its high costs. Although it offers a flexible pricing system that charges you only for what you use, the usage bill can get pretty high for some users.

Terraform meets AppOps

The growing adoption of microservices and Kubernetes gave rise to the need to efficiently manage, schedule, and control Kubernetes clusters, where tools like Terraform are helping many organizations address those challenges today. Terraform is a popular choice among DevOps and Platform Engineering teams as engineers can use the tool to quickly spin up and edit environments directly from their CI/CD pipelines.

Featured Post

Remote possibility: how to help remote staff achieve better work-life balance

The Covid-19 pandemic has dramatically altered working experiences and what we consider to be normal. Almost every industry has been affected and businesses were forced to scramble to find ways of operating at such a difficult time. Things have begun to improve, and we may be through the worst of the pandemic, but it has had a lingering effect.

Unlimited Preview Environments with Kubernetes Namespaces

In our big series of Kubernetes anti-patterns, we briefly explained that static test environments are no longer needed if you are using Kubernetes. They are expensive, hard to maintain, and hard to clean up. Instead, we suggested the adoption of temporary environments that are created on demand when a pull request is opened. In this article, we will see the practical explanations on how to achieve unlimited temporary environments using Kubernetes namespaces.

Influencing DevOps without Authority - How a DevOps Engineer can advance real DevOps

In this talk, Baruch will show how some proven influencing and negotiating techniques can be used to convince critical stakeholders in your organization in the necessity of DevOps. We look at the arguments, the techniques, and the small tricks, which work in particular situations with particular engineering and business leadership positions and will prepare you to deliver the message of DevOps most convincingly to each.

Push Notifications with HAProxy Edge - The HAProxy ADN

500 customers in 15 countries. 200 Billion push notifications delivered yearly. With over five years of experience in the industry, 500 customers and over 200 billion push notifications delivered each year, Batch.com prides itself as one of the world’s leading Mobile-First Customer Engagement Platform. Their motto “Keep pushing” exemplifies this, since their platform delivers push notifications to some of the world’s most prominent names in any industry.

The World Needs More Phrases Ending In "Ops"

A lot of people think that using the cloud makes you elastic, but cloud really only gives you the potential to be elastic. If your apps aren’t elastic, and your cloud usage doesn’t flex up and down based on activity levels, then it’s really just expensive. The same is true of containers—they don’t magically make all of your hosting problems go away, and while they have the potential to make you more agile and efficient, it isn’t that simple.

Linux kernel Livepatching

Canonical livepatch is the service and the software that enables organizations to quickly patch vulnerabilities on the Ubuntu Linux kernels. Livepatch provides uninterrupted service while reducing fire drills during high and critical severity kernel vulnerabilities. It is a complex technology and the details can be confusing, so in this post we provide a high level introduction to Ubuntu Linux kernel livepatching and the processes around it.

New Spot by NetApp Notification Center

While Spot by Netapp allows organizations to reliably and affordably run production environments on spot instances, operation teams always want to be alerted about any events of interest that occur in their environment. Over the last 5 years, Spot by NetApp customers have been using our existing notification mechanism and have shared excellent feedback for various enhancements and new capabilities.

Error Budgets That Work for You. Plus Support for New Relic Metrics and NR Query Language

Error Budgets That Work for You. Plus Support for New Relic Metrics and NR Query Language Did you know that error budget policy is the key to making SLOs actionable? In fact, Twitter’s engineering team did not successfully adopt SLOs until they introduced error budgets. SLOs enable teams to quantify customer happiness, and error budgets enable teams to make data-backed tradeoffs between reliability and feature velocity. We believe that teams optimizing for reliability must adopt both.

Encountering some turbulence on Bitbucket's journey to a new platform

The past week has been a turbulent time for Bitbucket Cloud's engineering and support teams as well as our customers. Some of you have expressed concern regarding our services’ performance and reliability in recent days. Fortunately, for the majority of Bitbucket users, our services have continued to perform smoothly. But given the number of developers who use Bitbucket daily, even a small percentage of our active users represents a lot of people.

Rootly Announces $3.2 Million in Seed Funding from XYZ Venture Capital, 8VC, & Y Combinator

Rootly is on a mission to create a world where maintaining reliability is frictionless, delightful, and accessible to anyone. Making resolving and learning from incidents every organizations superpower.

Kubernetes Master Class - Disaster Recovery with Rancher and Kubernetes

Everything breaks at some point; whether it is infrastructure (DNS, network, storage, etc.) or Kubernetes itself, something will fail eventually. In this session, we will walk through some common failure scenarios, including identifying failures and how to respond to them in the fastest way possible using the same troubleshooting steps, scripts, and tools Rancher Support uses when supporting our Enterprise customers.

Kubernetes Master Class - Scaling Kubernetes Nodes From Rancher

Take a deep dive with Staff Engineer Luther Monson into the new node pool scale down feature recently released in Rancher v2.5.6. This masterclass will walk you through everything you will need to know to go from zero to a scaling Kubernetes cluster using Rancher. We will explore using the cluster autoscaler in tandem with this new feature to scale pools on demand. Watch a full demo of a cluster sizing up and down to load while using a custom cloud provider built for the Rancher API.

Three Common Challenges to Monitoring StatsD and How to Tackle Them

StatsD is a key unifying protocol and set of tools for collecting application metrics and gaining visibility into the performance of applications. StatsD as a protocol was created by Etsy in 2011 for emitting application metrics. Soon after, the StatsD Server was developed as a tool for receiving StatsD line protocol metrics and subsequently aggregating them. While there are no official backends as part of the StatsD ecosystem, Graphite became the most commonly used.

Announcing Istio integration

Adoption of service meshes like Istio is increasing. As a result, Speedscale has developed a webassembly plugin. We extended Envoy using Rust, and no changes are required to your Istio configuration. This allows us to leverage the same sidecars that you have deployed throughout your environment to inspect API traffic. Once we are listening through Istio, the typical Speedscale magic can take place. We can use the data to build integration/performance test suites and autogenerate service mocks.

Compare Rancher and D2iQ's Enterprise Kubernetes Solution

In a relatively short amount of time, Kubernetes has evolved from an internal container orchestration tool at Google to the most important cloud-native technology across the world. Its rise in popularity has made Kubernetes the preferred way to build new software experiences and modernize existing applications at scale and across clouds.

How Slack Transformed Their CI With Tracing

Slack experienced meteoric growth between 2017 and 2020—but that level of growth came with growing pains. In his talk at the 2021 o11ycon+hnycon, Frank Chen (LinkedIn), a Slack Senior Staff Engineer, detailed one of Slack’s biggest pain points in that period: flaky tests. A flaky test returns both a passing and failing result despite no changes in the code. At one point, between 2017 and 2020, Slack’s flaky test rate reached as high as 50%.

Implementing an Internal Developer Platform

In a previous post, we discussed what an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) is and some drivers behind IDP initiatives. If we go through our interactions with different organizations, we see teams embarking on the journey to build their IDPs mainly driven by the following requirements: While building an IDP may seem like an obvious choice and initiative, it is definitely not an easy task to accomplish. Building an IDP involves dealing with many moving components.

DHCP scope

It’s possible to have more than one DHCP server on the same network and still have everything work right, with no conflicts and no dropped packets or IP requests. It’s really not that hard to pull together, either, but there are some things to know, and some things to consider before we investigate that situation. For this blog, we’ll put some of the overlooked facets of DHCP in bold text. Let’s take a look.

Step-By-Step Guide for a Successful Data Center Consolidation

Whether you are downsizing your infrastructure within a single room or eliminating half of your data center sites, a data center consolidation is a complex, risk-prone project. Fortunately, you can mitigate many of the mistakes and unwelcome surprises that even the most experienced data center professionals find derailing their project and instead enjoy the many advantages of a data center consolidation.

Pros and Cons of Free Web Hosting

Selecting a web hosting service is essential for making your site go live. But if you are starting up or have a limited budget, it is usually challenging to buy a hosting service costing as much as $100 per year. Most of the paid plans don't offer a free trial. If you just want to try a blogging idea, practice designing a website, or have limited to no earnings, you can get started with free web hosting.

Top 3 Ways Work From Anywhere Has Unknowingly Increased Your Security Risk

Teneo’s Andy de Clerck and Matt Lukash, and eSentire’s Mark Sangster discuss how users across the globe have left the safety and security of the traditional workplace, leaving companies at their most vulnerable because the full scope of their security exposure is unknown.

Achieving Multi Cloud Integration With SD WAN

The adoption of a multi-cloud approach is inevitable. Yet many struggle with the transition to multi-cloud due to legacy MPLS VPN networks, which weren’t designed for the Cloud. In this video, we explain how we’ve helped customers to solve this problem utilizing SD-WAN to eliminate complexity and deliver a cloud-first architecture.

Object Storage vs Block Storage - What's the difference?

At Taloflow we recently launched a way for companies migrating from AWS/GCP/Azure to 3rd party object storage providers like Storj to receive an objective TCO analysis of all the switching and storing costs associated. But what exactly is object storage - and how does it compare to block storage? For both, we will cover the technical description, benefits, and application use-cases.

A to Z of Kubernetes and Containerization

As more enterprises shift towards cloud-native, containers are proving their worth in providing developers with a flexible way to quickly get applications up and running in the cloud. Kubernetes is an integral part of this journey, offering an industry leading container orchestration platform to automate the deployment, scaling and management of containers.

3 ways Managed Services Providers can offer more value

For many businesses, using a Managed Services Provider (MSP) makes sense, particularly when it comes to database management, monitoring and security. They can control costs while still having access to expert resources, and dial up or down the service as required. It’s perhaps no surprise then that 47% of people surveyed in the Channel Futures 2020 MSP 501 Report identified professional services as a growth area, 51% identified enhanced network monitoring, and 85% identified security services.

CI/CD Pipeline: A Quick Guide

Fast and reliable build pipelines are crucial to the success of modern day engineering teams. Check out this quick guide that can help DevOps/SRE teams to streamline the integration of development and testing processes through CI/CD tools. All software companies are committed to providing services that are useful, appreciated, and shared. Therefore, it all boils down to delivering reliable software to users and consumers.

Top 10 Java Linters

If you want to ensure code maintainability over the long term, you should follow best coding practices and style guide rules. One of the best ways to achieve this, while also potentially finding bugs and other issues with your code, is to use a linter. Linters are best described as static code analyzers because they check your code before it even runs. They can work inside your IDE, run as part of your build process, or be inserted into your workflow anywhere in between.

JFrog And Red Hat DevSecOps Security Series

Accurately detecting and mitigating security vulnerabilities is critical for any enterprise. JFrog’s ongoing collaboration with Red Hat provides the DevOps community with enterprise-grade DevSecOps capabilities, enabling you to deliver high-quality, and more secure software, anywhere. As part of the Red Hat DevSecOps Security Series, Join us on July 1st for JFrog & Red Hat’s perspective on application analysis and how JFrog’s recently achieved Vulnerability Scanner Certification helps identify vulnerabilities in applications, images and configurations early in your lifecycle.

Demo: VMware Tanzu Standard Edition with Microsoft Azure

In this demo, we are going to look at using VMware Tanzu Standard edition with Microsoft Azure. Namely, the two products that will be seen are Tanzu Kubernetes Grid and Tanzu Mission Control. Tanzu Kubernetes Grid is the enterprise container runtime that utilizes cluster API to enable full lifecycle management. Global or fleet-wide management is the capability brought by Tanzu Mission Control. Tanzu Mission Control can inherit Tanzu Kubernetes Grid clusters to do provisioning and lifecycle management through its intuitive graphical user interface.

Lights out for SDH: What you need to know but were afraid to ask

Although SDH has been hugely successful, and we have learned a huge amount from it, we have now reached the point where supply is end of life. Fortunately, we now have technologies that deliver equal or better performance at a much lower cost. However, migrating legacy SDH services onto these new technologies can prove to be extremely expensive. Watch this webinar on-demand for.

The Confident Commit | Episode 6: Architecture meets delivery with Chris Richardson

Rob interviews Chris Richardson on how engineering metrics can help teams evaluate the effectiveness of their architecture. The two discuss how a team's architecture can enable or inhibit their ability to make changes quickly and confidently. How do you balance rapid delivery and finding product-market fit with getting to a stable, workable system over time? Tune in today!

Supporting Azure availability zone selection with Elastigroup

When designing a highly available compute environment one needs to determine the infrastructure layout required for uninterrupted application runtime even in the event of component failure. One key factor to be considered when planning for this is the geographic locations of all relevant resources. One must maintain physical separation between different compute resources with identical roles so that if a single datacenter goes down, applications remain operational.

Migrating Between Monitoring Systems

This question comes up all the time: How do you migrate between monitoring systems? The answer is both simple and complicated. In order to understand this better, rather than just rely on my own knowledge, I reached out to a number of people to see how they accomplished this. I’m going to summarize their process for you here in order to help others who may find themselves in need of this information.

Cloud Cost Management Tools Have A Bad Rap: Here's How We're Different

As a cloud cost intelligence platform, we spend nearly every day talking to companies about their cloud cost — and there’s something we’ve noticed — people don’t generally have the warm and fuzzies for their cloud cost management tools. You know, the ones that have been around for a while, that you use to build reports about your cloud spend? We won’t refer to them by name. These popular tools have really given the whole category a bit of a bad rap.

Finserv open source infrastructure powers digital transformation

Covid-19 pandemic has presented unprecedented challenges and opportunities for financial institutions to embrace digital transformation initiatives at pace and scale. Finservs are enhancing their purview of digital transformation initiatives to stay relevant and create a technology foundation that enables them to quickly bounce back from future contingencies. Finserv digital transformation is spurred by technology, and the leading technologies spurring digital transformation are open source.

5 Scenarios Where An Agile Networking Model Can Benefit Your Business

It is not just network performance that is important to today’s CIOs and network managers. Critical IT workflows and network traffic are rapidly growing and changing all the time, which is why enterprise networking needs to be more flexible and responsive than ever before. Here we look at a number of scenarios where a more agile networking model could better support the needs of a business…

How Cloud Technology Can Help Your Business

Between 2019 and 2020, more Australian businesses have turned to cloud computing technologies. A recent survey from the Australian Bureau of Statistics found that businesses using paid cloud computing — IT services used over the internet to access software, computing power, and storage capacity — jumped to 55% from 42% in 2017 to 2018. Indeed, cloud hosting technology is more popular now than ever before.

HAProxy Configuration Basics: Load Balance Your Servers

Learn how to set up basic load balancing using the HAProxy configuration file. If you’re new to using the HAProxy load balancer, you’ve come to the right place. In this blog post, you’ll learn how to configure HAProxy for basic load balancing. I am assuming that you’ve already installed the software. If not, there are several ways to do so.

Qovery - the ultimate AWS web console for SaaS startups

AWS is undoubtedly one of the best Cloud service providers to run serious business out there. Reliable and cost-effective. No doubt here. But something utterly wrong with AWS is the experience on their web management console. It is so bad that thousands of developers come using Qovery every month with the only promise of - a better developer experience on top of AWS. Here are the 7 reasons why Qovery is an excellent choice for SaaS startups.

Are 400GZR+ Pluggables an Embedded 800G Giant Killer?

We are now at the start of an era where 400GbE is breaking out of data centers and displacing 100GbE as the dominant client interface requiring wide-area optical transport. This is resulting in 400G lanes becoming the new building block of optical networks to transport existing 100GbE and growing 400GbE client traffic, for both metro and long haul applications.

Cycle Time Insight - Demo Den July 2021

Matt, a software developer on the Jira team building all things DevOps, shows off the brand new Cycle Time Insight and talks about how this insight can help your team go from issue deployed faster! Learn more about four key DevOps metrics to understand essential data DevOps teams require to have the visibility and control over their development pipeline.

Application Lifecycle Management: A Comprehensive Guide

Discipline is the key to success for all companies doing well in their field or reaching a trillion-dollar valuation. They manage the software and update it very frequently when it comes to providing services. So how are they able to manage it and keep their software updated every moment? The answer is ALM—Application Lifecycle Management. ALM includes the people, the software, the tools, and the processes included in software development, from planning to deploying it for end customers.

Containers vs serverless - It's about balancing simplicity with control

Chances are if you’re a developer or part of a DevOps team you’ve had a polarizing conversation or two about containers versus serverless. In this post we recap a debate hosted by NetApp on this topic. Arguing for containers is Kevin McGrath, Chief Technology Officer, Spot by NetApp. On the side of serverless is Forrest Brazeal, Director of Content and Community at A Cloud Guru. In this post we will cover the key arguments on both sides. YouTube An error occurred.

15 Best DevOps Tools to Use in 2021 and Beyond

As you stroll through history, what changes do you notice in the culture of the medieval period, early modern period, and today, as in the modern-day? That's a simple question to answer. Their clothing, eating habits, modes of communication, and vehicles have all evolved and continue to evolve in the current era. So, what benefits may a company's cultural shift bring? You guessed it correctly!!! New DevOps tools and technology have a significant impact on cultural change.

Tanzu Standard Edition: A Technical Overview in 8 Minutes

VMware Tanzu Standard builds on the foundation of Tanzu Basic by going further than Kubernetes lifecycle management. Tanzu Standard brings capabilities beyond vSphere, enabling a consistent Kubernetes experience across clouds, managing those Kubernetes clusters in a consistent fashion, and improving the security and governance using policy management at a global level. This video is a high-level look at the components to get you familiarized with them.

The More You Monitor: AIOps in the Future of Monitoring

You might be wondering what impact AIOps will have on infrastructure and application monitoring in the future. More than just algorithms and machine learning, AIOps takes a holistic AI approach that will allow IT organizations to work more proactively, perform more efficiently, and fix problems faster.

Elephant in the Blameless War Room: Accountability

We’ve always advocated that every company can benefit from a blameless culture . Fostering a blameless culture can profoundly boost your organization in powerful ways, from employee retention to developer velocity and innovation. However, there’s an elephant in the room when we talk about blamelessness with executives: accountability. When things go wrong, people still need to get fired, right?

Investigating the Scene of an Incident: Using a Time-Traveling Topology to Create Escalation Graphs

Yes, time travel is possible...through data. My ability to time travel began when I started coding at age 10. Back then, all of my code ran on my own little computer. Like many ten-year-olds, I coded to create and play games. I also coded cool graphics to accompany music to impress my friends and utilities for copying. I launched my first commercial website in 1996 and made 25 guilders, which was good money for a 15-year old. Life was so easy.

Intercept Security Scans with Vulnerability Webhooks

Security scanning provides an opportunity to target, track, and trace vulnerabilities introduced to your packages as soon as Cloudsmith has received a complete package upload. However what happens when you want to intercept the results of a scan immediately. An early warning can make a difference when distributing vulnerable packages to hundreds, thousands, or even millions of developers, devices, or systems globally.

Why Path-to-Production Analysis Is a Must for Software Development Teams

One of the key metrics IT leaders care about is the total time it takes for a release to go from development to being live in production. The metric used to measure that duration is called the “release lead time.” It can range from days to months, depending on factors such as team agility, enterprise constraints, and interdependencies.

How to Build a Strong Open Source Community: Best Practices and Lessons Learned

When the VMware Tanzu Community Engagement team assembled three years ago, we did so with the belief that strong, sustainable community engagement is a crucial component of successful open source projects. With a mission of helping to build up and improve communities, we set out to support several VMware-originated open source projects.

Digital Twins and IoT: Unlock Deeper Process Intelligence

A digital twin is a virtual or digital replica of a physical entity. In the Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) realm, a digital twin is the dynamic virtual copy of a physical framework, a vehicle, a machine, or any device. Most often, a digital twin is developed to carry out simulations before the actual device is manufactured. Today, digital twin is taking the IoT industry by storm and the market is expected to hit $16 billion by 2023.