Sending custom metrics to Datadog allows you to monitor important data specific to your business and applications, such as latency, dollars per customer, items bought, or trips taken. And tags are key to being able to slice and dice these custom metrics to quickly find the information you need. But collecting enough custom metrics to have complete visibility can be cost prohibitive. For example, you might run microservices instrumented across thousands of containers.

CircleCI orbs are reusable packages of YAML configuration that condense repeated pieces of config into a single line of code. Since its launch in 2018, the CircleCI orbs registry has been used by developers, development teams, and by companies who want to help developers integrate their services seamlessly into continuous integration pipelines. In this tutorial, we will show how to use CircleCI orbs to continuously deploy a Node.js application to Heroku, one of the most popular hosting platforms.

In basically every modern software organization, building software is not just a matter of writing code – it’s a matter of testing it to ensure it works properly, a matter of creating artifacts out of it that can be used by the end customers, and a matter of deploying them to a customer-accessible location for these customers to be able to actually use it.

Speedscale Inc. has achieved SOC 2 Type I compliance in accordance with American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) standards for SOC for Service Organizations also known as SSAE 18. Achieving this standard with an unqualified opinion serves as third-party industry validation that Speedscale Inc. provides enterprise-level security for customer’s data secured in the Speedscale Inc. System. Speedscale Inc.

SREs and SWEs complement each other, but they perform different tasks and focus on different priorities.

Software development is getting faster and more complex – frustrating IT operations teams more than ever. So, DevOps gained popularity in order to combat siloed workflows, decreased collaboration and a lack of visibility. While establishing a culture of DevOps has helped teams collaborate better and deliver reliable software faster, DevOps teams don’t necessarily have someone specifically dedicated to developing systems that increase site reliability and performance.

Microsoft Azure is the public cloud computing platform by Microsoft which offers software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). It comprises more than 600 cloud services and supports varied operating systems, databases, and developer tools. And, even better, Splunk On-Call integrates with Microsoft Azure to help on-call teams improve incident response for Azure-based environments.

DevOps-oriented engineers live at the intersection of IT operations and software development – understanding much of what it takes to maintain IT infrastructure while also being able to write code and deploy new services. DevOps-minded teams not only create services – but they also maintain them. A DevOps structure forces teams to take accountability for their applications and infrastructure instead of allowing developers to throw code over the proverbial wall to IT operations.

Continuous integration (CI) makes the cycle from design to code to building artifacts seamless and consistent. Continuous delivery (CD) makes delivery of that artifact to an environment the same every time. But, what about the actual environment the artifact is running in? Is it the same every time? That’s a hard thing to guarantee — unless you take advantage of an Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) approach. This post explains how to use Infrastructure-as-Code to improve CI/CD.

Because DevOps practices can bring great speed and reliability to the software delivery lifecycle, release management can seem daunting. But, the improved visibility and collaboration brought about by DevOps can also help with the release management process. While the general concept of release management doesn’t really change between ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) and DevOps, there are a few ways that the process differs.

Over the past few years, cloud computing has enabled agile, dynamic management of software and hardware components, on-demand. Nowadays, we can define our desired infrastructure in as little as a few lines of code, and we can provision real servers on cloud providers like AWS or Azure. Terraform is an open-source infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tool that has become the de facto solution for provisioning one aspect of those components.

OpenStack vs AWS is a discussion that almost every organisation must conduct when adopting a cloud strategy. This is because OpenStack and AWS are undoubtedly some of the most popular cloud technologies in both public and private cloud space. While AWS is the most popular commercial cloud platform, OpenStack remains its most popular open source equivalent. Both have their own pros and cons. But which one is better for you?

I’m excited to share Puppet’s increased commitment to government agencies through a new relationship with Carahsoft. Through this relationship, Puppet, the industry leader in infrastructure automation, will increase its availability of Puppet Enterprise on preferred government purchasing vehicles, like the General Services Administration (GSA) Schedule 70, NASA SEWP, and a number of other federal, state, and local contracts.

I am super excited to announce that we have released our "clone environment" feature. It is a massive update!! With one click, you can duplicate an existing environment. The cloning environment has been a significant feature expected by our customers and users for a long time. Thanks to our beta testers and our team for making it live for everyone. Here is a short video showing the clone environment in action ‍

Let’s face it: Creating the optimal CI/CD workflow is not always a simple task. In fact, writing effective and efficient configuration code is the biggest hurdle that many developers face in their DevOps journey. But you don’t need to be an expert to set up a fast, reliable testing and deployment infrastructure. With a few straightforward techniques, you can optimize your config.yml file and unleash the full potential of your CI/CD pipelines.

The past few weeks have marked a real milestone for the Mattermost community. My co-founder and longtime colleague, Ian, shared his reflections on our huge v6.0 launch, and I echo his take on the magnitude of the launch and our new product capabilities. As CTO at Mattermost, I have the unique pleasure of leading product development efforts for an open source platform backed by an inspiring community of contributors and enthusiasts.

The way we socialize, learn, shop, and receive care has changed drastically over the last 18 months. For many of us, perhaps one of the most drastic changes was the way we work. While work from home (WFH) was an option before the pandemic, NCCI states, “only 6% of the employed worked primarily from home and about three-quarters of workers had never worked from home.” Fast forward to 2021, and according to NorthOne, here’s how much things have changed.

Are you spending time on high-impact, high-value activities, or are you constantly derailed by maintenance, support, and deployment challenges? Does your organisation consume open-source software that needs security patching? Where do you get the security updates from, and how do you track what’s available? Are you responsible for vulnerability management, compliance, and long term maintenance of the software running on top of Ubuntu in your organisation?

Juju re-imagines the world of operating software securely, reliably, and at scale. Juju realizes the promise of model-driven operations. Excellent observability is undeniably a key ingredient for operating software well, which is why the Charmed Operator ecosystem has long provided operators the ability to run a variety of open source monitoring software. We collectively refer to these operators as the Logs, Metrics, and Alerts (LMA) stack.

How are organizations managing security and compliance for open source packages nowadays? As you may recall from our annual State of Kubernetes surveys, security and compliance are always a top concern. Our recent survey, The State of the Software Supply Chain: Open Source Edition 2021, gives some great insight into how people are addressing those concerns. It also gives some guidance on how to build your own policies.

NS1 is an intelligent DNS and traffic management platform that helps optimize the performance of your network infrastructure and speed application delivery to your end users. Since even a small increase in service latency can lead to churn and revenue loss, it’s critical to remove any inefficiencies embedded in basic network functions. NS1 helps ensure high performance for name resolution and routing through support for the edns0-client-subnet (ECS) DNS extension and for Filter Chain technology.

When the Daylight saving time starts, and the computer’s clock jumps forward, what does cron do? If the clock jumps from 1AM to 2AM, and there is a job scheduled for 1:30AM, will cron run this job? If yes, when? Likewise, when the Daylight saving time ends, and the clock jumps backward, will cron possibly run the same scheduled job twice? Let’s look at what “man cron” says.

The benefits of containerizing workloads are numerous and proven. But, during infrastructure transformations, organizations are experiencing common, consistent challenges that interfere with accurately forecasting the costs for hosting workloads in Kubernetes. Planning the proper reservations for CPU and memory before migrating to containers is a persistent issue Densify observes across our customers.

An Application Private Network (APN) is a private, encrypted network running in parallel with your standard network - essentially a VPN for your application.

We all remember a couple of biblical allegories here. That of the Good Samaritan, that of The Prodigal Son, that of an Aragonese with new Adidas and the trolleybus on line 8… But the one that interests us today is that of the most holy and bethlemite David, preceded by Saul and succeeded by Solomon, who, among his many achievements, managed to defeat the Philistine giant Goliath.

Deep in the woods, where trees are black and the air is thick, steam rises wistfully across the damp ground. A single dirt track, barely wide enough to pass, scars the terrain for what seems like an endless number of miles. It winds its way through the mountains and valleys, across a rickety bridge over a cavernous ravine, before plunging back into darkness, the trees bending over as if to grasp those passing through. Finally, in a small clearing, a lonely decrepit wooden cabin reveals itself.

A crucial part of effective package management is package distribution. Whether you are dealing with distributed development teams, deploying a distributed application or even if you are a software vendor, you need efficient, performant and reliable delivery of your software packages or artifacts. And for that, you need infrastructure. Lots of infrastructure. To deliver software globally, at low latencies, you’ll need infrastructure in many regions, preferably as many as possible.

To have full visibility into modern cloud environments, businesses need to collect an ever-growing avalanche of log data from a range of highly complex data sources. Indexing logs is key for real-time monitoring and troubleshooting, but it can quickly become expensive at high volumes, meaning that organizations often must choose which logs to index and which to archive.

Last year, we launched the Datadog Marketplace, which lets Datadog partners develop and trade applications that provide custom monitoring solutions for specific use cases. Now, we’re pleased to announce Datadog Apps, which introduces even further customizability to the Datadog platform. With Datadog Apps, you can now build and share your own Datadog UI features that seamlessly combine functionality from your third-party tools with the full range of Datadog’s monitoring capabilities.

For many organizations, the success of their business depends on their ability to maintain on-prem or hybrid infrastructure. For instance, some companies rely on data centers for security reasons or to support their large, static workloads, while others must execute their critical business processes as close to the edge as possible to ensure minimal latency.

Today at Dash 2021, we announced new products and features that give your team even greater visibility into the health and performance of your code, databases, CI/CD pipelines, and more. Now, you can monitor network devices, get visibility into your services' golden signal metrics without touching a single line of code, and integrate third-party tools into our platform with Datadog Apps. We expanded RUM to include iOS error tracking, Session Replay, and Watchdog Insights.

There’s a reason why thousands of Engineers, Testers, and other Reliability specialists signed up for Gremlin’s first Gremlin Certified Chaos Engineering Practitioner (GCCEP) certificate program: Chaos Engineering is in high demand, and the market is looking for professionals who know how to wield it well.

One of the most challenging tasks for Site Reliability Engineers is to align the reliability of the systems with the business goals. There is a constant battle between delivering more features—which increases the product’s value—and keeping the system reliable and maintainable. A significant ally to achieve both objectives is the Service Level Objective Framework.

The CircleCI Insights dashboard was designed to help you improve your delivery efficiency. We launched the dashboard a year ago to provide teams with actionable data for optimizing your pipelines. Since then, we’ve been listening to your feedback. By far, the most requested functionality is the ability to gain further visibility into test performance.

It’s Cyber Security Awareness Month, and many IT professionals are being haunted by the thought of gearing up for a security and compliance audit. Preparing for an IT audit can take months of planning. It can be time-consuming, uncomfortable, and stressful. Guess what else takes a long time and can be uncomfortable and stressful? Creating a human!

The AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) automatically distributes your incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses, in one or more Availability Zones, ultimately increasing the availability and fault tolerance of your applications. In other words, ELB, as its name implies, is responsible for distributing frontend traffic to backend servers in a balanced manner.

This case study showcases La langue française, an online learning platform and publication that teaches people how to speak French. La langue française hosts their Ruby on Rails application on Vultr with the help of Cloud 66.

The market for Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) is pegged at $4.25 billion in 2025. The reasons are many – from the recent surge in AR/VR gaming, to a growing preference for video calling and Ultra-High-Definition, and of course, the Internet of Things (IoT) that spawn SmartX applications, including cities, manufacturing, agriculture, and logistics. The majority of MEC opportunity is both driving and driven by 5G, and the two will grow hand-in-hand in the days to come.

An application’s success depends on many factors. One of the most crucial is how it performs when actual users interact with it. The chances are that even if you properly prepare your entire software development strategy, problems will occur at some point or another.

Ever heard the saying “Too many cooks”? If you’ve responded to incidents, you’ll likely understand the parallels. There are cases when incident command on a public channel isn’t the best option: Whatever your reason, we’ve got you covered. Now available, users can spin up a private slack channel for an incident. Read more how to do this here.

At Speedscale, we are on the cutting edge of defining autonomous testing for the cloud era. However, we aren’t the only company trying to solve this problem and we enjoy learning from every perspective. That’s why Facebook’s recent blog article about autonomous testing caught my eye. They’ve built a sophisticated autonomous test system that introduces many of the same techniques we utilize.

Retrospectives are a well-established resource in the software and systems engineering toolbox. From sprint retros through to post-incident reviews, we look back on our work to learn from it and to get better. We can apply the same ideas to our professional practice with a personal retrospective: writing an analysis of our experiences to learn as much as possible. We could look over a whole year of work, or focus more closely on a particular project.

Cloud teams are busy. In fact, Virtana’s recently published State of Hybrid Cloud and FinOps survey found that 44% of respondents have deployed more than half of their workloads in a public cloud, and 88% have deployed more than one-quarter of their workloads in a public cloud. That’s a lot of migration, optimization, and management on the cloud team’s plate; and it’s not just for right now but for the foreseeable future.

The release of OpenStack Charms 21.10 brings native support for OpenStack Xena in Charmed OpenStack. This latest version of OpenStack comes with initial support for SmartNICs in Nova and further improvements around Neutron Open Virtual Network (OVN) driver integration. In order to further simplify the job of the cloud operations teams, the OpenStack Charms 21.10 release offers improved day-2 automation, including additional charm actions and better upgrade experience, and new operations documentation.

In the context of enterprise process automation, technology is used to automate operations, thus improving efficiency and achieving corporate objectives. Processes are defined as the actions and activities that bring your company closer to achieving a specific goal. By automating routine tasks using software solutions, you may save operational expenses while also decreasing the amount of time it takes to complete tasks.

Datadog CI Visibility provides a unified platform for monitoring your CI/CD pipelines. Now, we are partnering with CircleCI to extend that same critical visibility to your CircleCI environment. Datadog’s integration uses CircleCI webhooks to capture information about the status and performance of your workflows and associated jobs, such as a job’s duration and whether or not it failed or was canceled.

When you sign a contract, you expect both parties to hold their end of the bargain. The same can be true for testing applications. Contract testing is a way to make sure that services can communicate with each other and that the data shared between the services is consistent with a specified set of rules. In this post, I will guide you through using Joi as a library to create API contracts for services consuming an API.

Learn about the key roles within an incident response team, as well as optional incident roles you may not have thought about.

The introduction of Git as a source-code management system in 2005 fundamentally transformed the process of software development. Git allows developers to maintain a history of changes, or commits, to their code and revert to previous commits in seconds if something goes wrong. It makes collaboration easier by allowing branching to keep code for different features separate and seamlessly merging commits by various people.

We are proud to share that Sunbird was recognized by Datacenter Insider as silver award winner in the Datacenter Innovations category in their 2021 IT Awards. According to Datacenter Insider, this year's IT Awards received a record 64,000 reader votes. Datacenter Insider's readers were able to choose from one of the nominated companies available for selection as their favorite by online voting and were able to suggest other companies as well.

Amazon Web Service or AWS has an immense cloud ecosystem now counting at over 200 services and products. Started with first generation services like EC2, S3, and RDS, now you can have satellite control centers, build virtual reality, and compose music using Artificial Intelligence. As the variety of services expanded, the necessity to monitor all those services efficiently became critical. Running a service without a proper monitoring system is no different from running while blind-folded.

In this article, we will look at what the Kubernetes metrics server is and what it is used for. We will also learn how to set up a metrics server and use it to monitor Kubernetes metrics. Finally, we will explore how to use hosted Graphite by MetricFire for monitoring Kubernetes metrics.

Observability has gained a lot of momentum and is now rightly a central component of the microservices landscape: It’s an important part of the cloud native world where you may have many microservices deployed on a production Kubernetes cluster, and a need to monitor these microservices keeps rising. In production, quickly finding failures and fixing them is crucial. As the name suggests, observability plays an important role in this failure discovery.

In modern communications networks the demand for more speed and more capacity to drive ever more advanced services has been at the heart of network development – especially in the mobile space. Even the generational numbers hint at the increases – 3G, 4G, 5G - every change indicating an increase, every change indicating something that is somehow bigger and better. And, of course, the impression created is largely correct.

When running a cloud service, it’s never good for customers to be the first people noticing an issue. It happened to our customers over the course of a few months, and we began to accumulate a series of reports of unpredictable start-up times for Docker jobs. At first the reports were rare, but the frequency began to increase. Jobs with high parallelism were disproportionately represented in the reports.

Docker is a high-level virtualization platform that lets you package software as isolated units called containers. Containers are created from images that include everything needed to run the packaged workload, such as executable binaries and dependency libraries. Images are defined in Dockerfiles. These resemble sequential scripts that are executed to assemble an image.

The e-commerce sector has been growing for the past few years. It was one of a few winners during the pandemic crises, increasing its global market share to 17% in 2020. The worldwide market is predicted to reach $5.7 trillion in 2022, according to the SmartInsights report. As a result of the pandemic, we noticed an increase in small and local retail businesses moving online. Two out of three small businesses now accept online payments (PayPal Canada).

If you’re aiming for continuous improvement with your DevOps effort, prioritize these skills. They’re critical to helping teams conquer cultural and technology challenges It’s no longer a question of if organizations need DevOps, but rather when they should adopt it, according to the DevOps Institute Upskilling 2021 report.

It’s 2014. A major Dutch bank is struggling with performance problems in highly visible customer-facing applications. These performance problems are proving to be incredibly difficult to resolve. It’s not that there’s no monitoring data that could potentially help. In fact, there’s tons of it, all nicely displayed in pretty dashboard after pretty dashboard.

This article walks you through: As of 2020, 81% of organizations had at least one application running on the cloud. It is a fact that, be it small, medium, or large, all businesses are moving towards the cloud. Companies are looking to adopt cloud computing services for elasticity, agility, and scalability. With enterprise-class technology accessed from the cloud, businesses can act fast, embrace pay-as-you-go services and disrupt the market today while staying lean and agile. ​

Companies across industries are under tremendous pressure to develop and deploy IT applications and services faster and with far greater efficiency. Traditional enterprise application development falls short since it is not efficient and speedy. IT and business leaders are keen to take advantage of cloud computing as it offers businesses cost savings, scalability at the touch of a button, and flexibility to respond quickly to change.

Kubernetes is the leading container-orchestration tool that was open-sourced in 2014 by Google and has helped engineers across the globe to significantly lower their cost of cloud computing ever since. Kubernetes also provides a resilient framework for deploying applications. Kubernetes management tools are quickly becoming essential to those that wish to monitor their containers on an ongoing basis, test, export and create intuitive dashboards.

Last week, we celebrated the Ubuntu 21.10 release on the Ubuntu On Air channel, where a wide range of guests discussed their Impish Indri highlights as well as some thoughts for the future. Today we thought we would share ours! For Linux desktop users, Impish Indri contains a number of new features plus a preview or two for you to try out ahead of our LTS release next year with 22.04. So here are our top 5 must try for Ubuntu Desktop 21.10.

The cloud not only ushered in a different way of developing and deploying software, but it also introduced a fundamentally different security reality, presenting new challenges to teams responsible for keeping environments secure. Designed to be dynamic, cloud environments can be in a near-constant state of change, with infrastructure resources spun up and down multiple times a day to support cloud applications.

When companies use Elastigroup, Spot by NetApp’s cloud compute platform, they’re able to operate the most efficient, reliable infrastructure at the lowest possible cost. Elastigroup’s core features automate infrastructure management and optimize cloud resources, delivering up to 90% savings on cloud costs.

Last week, we spent some time talking to Gergely Orosz about our thoughts on what happens when an incident is over, and you're looking back on how things went. If you haven't read it already, grab a coffee, get comfortable, and read Gergely's full post Postmortem Best Practices here. But before you do that, here's some bonus material on some of our points.

Flux is a CNCF based open source stack of tools. Flux focuses on making it possible to keep Kubernetes clusters and cloud-native applications in sync with external resources and definitions hosted in environments such as GitHub. Implementing tools like FluxCD should enable you to achieve results such as: The results above can bring obvious benefits, and many teams are adopting FluxCD as their tool of choice for GitOps.

The fintech ecosystem is flourishing and exciting things are happening these days at the intersection of digital technology and financial services – thanks in part to an infusion of global fintech investment that reached US$98 billion across 2,456 deals in H1’21. This far outpaces last year’s annual total of $121.5 billion across 3,520 deals.

The role and responsibilities of a site reliability engineer (SRE) may vary depending on the size of the organization. For the most part, a site reliability engineer is focused on multiple tasks and projects at one time, so for most SREs, the various tools they use reflect their eve-evolving responsibilities. A typical SRE is busy automating, cleaning up code, upgrading servers, and continually monitoring dashboards for performance, etc., so they are going to see more tools in that toolbelt.

Data center automation is the process in which routine processes of data center operations are completed without any manual effort. It increases operational efficiency, improves data accuracy, and simplifies data center management. One of the leading organizations in driving automation via integration with Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software is Workday. Workday has been a Sunbird customer for over five years and currently has 900+ users on their system and growing.

The forced transition of all business forms to remote work has created a high demand for hosting. To survive in the new conditions, even small coffee shops create their own web pages using the services of hosting providers or B2B eCommerce hosting platforms. Meanwhile, certain technical features of hosting do not allow one company to monopolize this relatively new services market. All this makes hosting service providing a promising form of business to this day.

I’ve been leading software teams for more than 20 years and one thing I’ve learned about metrics is that leaders tend to put too much emphasis on engineering metrics alone, without considering the bigger picture. After speaking to a range of engineering industry leaders, and poring over millions of jobs processed from software teams worldwide, we found that the most insightful and relevant metrics fall into three categories: What metrics are meaningful for your team to measure?

Sit down with Ana and Jason for this week's show with Leonardo (Leo) Murillo, principal partner solutions architect at Weaveworks, and former DJ, who joins us from Costa Rica. Leo shares his take on GitOps, offers a lot of excellent resources to check out, and shares his thoughts on automating reliability. He also defines how to account for the “DJ variable” and “party parameters” alongside some fun anecdotes on DevOps.

This post outlines the quickest path available for a developer to use a basic Mattermost app on a local setup. It makes use of Docker containers, a Node.js app, and — of course — a Mattermost instance! When you’re ready to get started with the Mattermost App Framework, here are the steps that you will need to take.

For the past five years, CircleCI has hired third-party penetration testing firms that hammer our product releases or infrastructure at minimum every 90 days. To date, we’ve done more than 25 of these. Sometimes they cover new product features and other times they cover infrastructure.

In a perfect world, small pieces of software scale up and down with a high-performance message broker like a heart, pumping data in a controlled, efficient manner. However, at some point, in every single system, an application starts pumping out large data requests, in a sporadic, uncontrollable manner. Because here, we are talking about the real world, right? In this article, we will address the problem of adapting a legacy system to play with a stream-based platform.

Ubuntu 21.10 is the latest release of Ubuntu and comes as the last interim release before the forthcoming 22.04 LTS release due in April 2022. As the interim releases are often proving grounds for upcoming features in the LTS releases, this provides a good opportunity to take stock of some of the latest security features delivered in this release, on the road to 22.04 LTS.

VMware Tanzu Community Edition is a freely available, community-supported, open source distribution of VMware Tanzu that was announced at DevOps Loop 2021.

All too often, the Kelverion team hear that businesses are trying to deliver more services with less resource, all whilst meeting tight Service Level Agreements. There are many automation use cases to relieve this pressure, and this article explores the six use case examples driving automation adoption within service management.

Version 2.4 improves its e2e tests, revamps how logging in the HAProxy Data Plane API works, adds support for namespace filtering in Consul Service Discovery, improves runtime capabilities for maps and ACLs, adds server-template support and adds log_targets to global and defaults sections.

Here’s a common situation that plagues many development teams. You run an application through your CI/CD pipeline and all of the tests pass, which is great. But when you deploy it to a live target environment the application just does not function as expected. You can’t always predict what will happen when your application is pushed live. The solution?