Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

January 2023

Featured Post

Seven predictions for this year from two CTOs

Rod Cope and Deepak Giridharagopal, CTOs of Perforce, share their top technology-related predictions for this year and beyond. Their predictions cover various areas, but looking at the market from the perspective of Puppet (by Perforce), there are two clear themes: one, maximising and looking after available talent, and two, focusing on technology that delivers (rather than being distracted by the hype).

The KPIs of improved reliability

For many businesses, prioritizing reliability is an ongoing challenge. Building reliable systems and services is critical for growing revenue and customer trust, but other initiatives—like building new products and features—often take precedence since they provide a clearer and more immediate return. That's not to say reliability doesn't have clear value, but proving this value to business leaders can be tricky.

The Case for IT Remote Support in Education Institutions

A few years ago, the school’s technical support could still cope with its tasks. Help with technology in the classroom, maintenance of educational platforms, statistics, accounting – all these were difficult, but it was still possible to handle a few people and the IT department of the school. But the pandemic has shown how educational institutions, from elementary schools to universities and academies, need more time to be ready for large-scale work in the digital space.

Selecting the Best Azure VM Type for Your Workload

Organizations all over the world have been moving workloads to the cloud. Microsoft Azure provides a host of benefits and services which make it a top choice for on-premises to cloud migrations. When it comes to migrating workloads, Azure virtual machines are a great choice with VM options up to 416 vCPUs and 12 TB of memory and storage IOPS up to 3.7 million.

Azure Application Insights vs Log Analytics: Which one should you choose?

We often speak to organizations about Azure and one of the common questions is what is the difference between App Insights and Log Analytics. In this article we will aim to discuss those differences and overlaps. If we think about the Azure Monitoring Platform / ecosystem, then Log Analytics and App Insights both play a role within that platform as shown below. Log Analytics plays a role in the storage of Log Data and the analysis of Log Data.

Analytics in Squadcast | Visualize Team and Organization Level Analytics | MTTA MTTR | Squadcast

Analyzing incident data plays a key role to do better SRE. Squadcast's Analytics Dashboard helps you analyze the performance of your Organization/ Team, for a given time period. It also gives you more insight into past outages that affected your systems.

GitHub Tried to Change the Checksum for Release Archives. You Should Start Hosting Your Own.

Yesterday, GitHub changed how the archives they provided are made. The result of this change surprised developers, triggering pipeline failures all over the world in most ecosystems. According to this GitHub post, this is a consequence of recent changes to Git itself, released almost six months ago and just deployed within GitHub now with unforeseen impact. This change has thankfully been retracted.

Webinar: State of DevOps | A Look Ahead at 2023

“DevOps” has never been more popular than it is today; it seems to be on the top of everyone’s minds and constantly evolving. So what can we expect to see in terms of trends for 2023? Join us as we continue our December conversation and discuss our predictions for DevOps and Software Supply Chain Security for the year ahead with community leaders. We will delve into some common and not-so-common opinions and topics you are likely to hear more and more about as the year progresses.

3 Key Questions to Ask Before Getting Started with Kubernetes

If you need to deploy a lot of microservices at once and manage them at scale, Kubernetes is hard to beat. But Kubernetes also brings additional complexity that you just might not need. You would be smart to ask yourself these three questions before getting started with Kubernetes.

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What are Network Operation Centers (NOC) and how do NOC teams work?

Modern-day markets are highly competitive and in order to foster stronger customer relations, we see businesses striving hard to be always available and operational. Hence, businesses invest heavily to ensure higher uptime and to have dedicated teams that constantly monitor the performance of an organization's IT resources. In this blog, we will explore what NOC teams are and why they are important.

The Business Case for CAPI: Enhanced Kubernetes Management and More

There are instances in which organizations miss the opportunity to improve their infrastructure and gain competitive advantages by clinging to entrenched, well-worn technologies with which they are comfortable. This is the case with Terraform and Cluster API (CAPI). When explaining to various organizations the benefits they could gain through CAPI, I have heard hesitant responses such as.

4 Ways To Help Engineers Understand How Their Choices Affect Cloud Costs

When it comes to cloud costs, engineers have a particular reputation. The executive suite and finance department often share perplexing frustration about why engineers appear not to care about budgets and costs at all. They provide hard budget limits, yet engineers frequently surpass them, citing performance and user experience as reasons for the excess spending.

Why Platform Engineering Teams Are the Key to Unlocking DevOps

Building digital platforms, and platform engineering teams to support them, isn’t new. The platform approach first emerged more than 20 years ago and predates the DevOps movement that began in the mid-2000s. But the recent surge in popularity of platform engineering has caused some to argue that “DevOps is dead” and modern platform engineering has replaced it. Here’s what we found in the 2023 State of DevOps Report to counter that argument.

Deciphering container complexity from operations to security

Kubernetes turns 9 this year and with its maturity each year, it brings new challenges that drive seismic influence across the rapidly changing cloud native ecosystem. Each year we see new tools created and existing solutions optimized from new lightweight distributions, new features across Kubernetes management platforms, and container security solutions, all adding value to users but simultaneously contributing to the complexity are facing to run Kubernetes successfully.

Network and Infrastructure Monitoring - Is Every Tool the Same?

Every organization reaches a certain size where network and infrastructure monitoring becomes a necessity. And while that “certain size” will depend on whether you’re running a private company, non-profit organization or government agency, the time to act always comes. Network and Infrastructure Monitoring tools enable organizations to harness greater benefits from their computing infrastructures. How you use these tools can even give you a competitive advantage.

Are VMWare snapshots backups?

A VMware snapshot is a point-in-time copy of the virtual machine’s disk files and memory state. These snapshots are used to capture the state of a virtual machine at a specific point in time and allow users to revert to a previous state if necessary. They are commonly used for testing, patching, recovery, or rollback, but can also be used for taking backups of virtual machines.

Cutting Cloud Costs: 5 Strategies We Use at Qovery

With the current macroeconomic situation, it's more important than ever to keep a close eye on our cloud costs. But here at Qovery, we don't just focus on cutting costs - we also want to make sure we're getting the most bang for our buck. In other words, we want to consume our budget in a way that gives us the most resources.

What Is A DevOps Pipeline? A 2023 Beginner-Friendly Guide

Did you know that Google Search changes how it works about 12 times daily? For example, the internet search giant made about 4,500 changes to Search in 2020 alone. Those changes involved running more than 600,000 tests. Most of us can barely tell how often Google updates because the modifications are subtle. But we can tell that something keeps improving. Many other leading tech solutions do the same, from your tiniest mobile app to big ol’ Apple products.

Kubernetes in the Enterprise Virtual Roundtable

Following the release of DZone’s Kubernetes in the Enterprise Trend Report, this Virtual Roundtable brings together subject matter experts, community contributors, and partners to discuss the research findings and the future growth of Kubernetes. With the expectations of Kubernetes becoming more entrenched into systems, what do the adoption and deployment methods look like compared to previous years?

4 DevOps KPIs to Measure How Well Your DevOps is Working

DevOps is an approach, not a prescriptive ideal. Still, every organization needs to be able to measure the impact and effectiveness of their investment in DevOps tools and practices. That's why we collected the top DevOps KPIs from a combination of our own research into the latest DevOps trends in the State of DevOps (including surveys of more than 4,000 people) and stories shared with Puppet.

Monitor Boundary on the HashiCorp Cloud Platform with Datadog

HashiCorp Boundary provides a secure way to manage remote access to applications and infrastructure without exposing the underlying network or credentials. Launched two years ago as an open source solution, HashiCorp recently announced a fully managed version on the HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP), enabling you to manage identity-based authorizations, user and target onboarding, and more for dynamic environments.

How Ubuntu Pro delivers enhanced security and manageability for Linux Desktop users

At the end of last year Canonical announced that Ubuntu Pro, our expanded security maintenance and compliance subscription, is now available for data centers and desktops as a public beta. This week, Ubuntu Pro entered general availability, giving Ubuntu users access to extra hardening and security patching. If you’re a developer using Ansible, Apache Tomcat, Apache Zookeeper, Docker, Nagios, Node.js, phpMyAdmin, Puppet or Python 2, you’ll want to read on.

Ubuntu Pro enters general availability

Ubuntu Pro, Canonical’s comprehensive subscription for secure open source and compliance, is now generally available. Ubuntu Pro, released in beta in October last year, helps teams get timely CVE patches, harden their systems at scale and remain compliant with regimes such as FedRAMP, HIPAA and PCI-DSS. The subscription expands Canonical’s ten-year security coverage and optional technical support to an additional 23,000 packages beyond the main operating system.

GitOps The Planet #6 - K3s, Rancher, and now Acorn - Dev Productivity Nirvana with Darren Shepherd

ibuildcloud, aka Darren Shepherd, is the CTO and co-founder at Acorn Labs - a simple application development framework for Kubernetes. Before Acorn Labs, Darren was the CTO and co-founder of Rancher Labs (acquired by Suse) where he created k3s and a lot more. In this episode we'll talk about the changing developer experience landscape the effect of GitOps, k3s, and these new frameworks.

Why You Need Continuous Compliance and Risk Management

Continuous compliance and risk management can help keep your organization safe as the threat landscape changes and expands each year. IT Ops teams aren’t just working on a single machine, or even a few; they are working across technologies, across teams, at scale and expected to work fast while also considering the requirements of cost and compliance and trying to navigate around skills gaps that continue to appear.

Observability Innovation Report 2023

StackState commissioned Techstrong Research, a strategy and technology analyst firm, to delve into the current state of observability. The resulting report, “Observability Innovation Report 2023,” provides insightful information. 543 IT professionals were surveyed, globally, across 20 industries. The largest concentration of respondents were in the telecommunications, technology, Internet and electronics sectors, followed by financial services.

Kubernetes vs Mesos vs Swarm

If you're reading this blog, you might ask yourself what container orchestration engines are, what problems they solve, and how the different engines distinguish themselves. Read on for a high-level overview of Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, and Apache Mesos, as well as a few of their notable similarities and differences.

5 Important Data Center Management Trends for 2023

As we reflect on 2022, it’s important to identify the latest data center trends that will continue to impact how data centers are managed in 2023 and beyond. You must stay up to date on new industry trends in order to better support your organization and customers while staying competitive in your field. Here are five data center management trends that you should know about going into the new year.

Leveraging WebAssembly for improved performance in Kubernetes

Over time, limitations were found with the programming languages responsible for creating web applications, leading to the development of WebAssembly (WASM). You can leverage WASM to create applications for web browsers using other high-level programming languages than those traditionally used for web development. As a result, developers can now build cloud-native applications that can work more efficiently with Kubernetes and other cloud-native technologies.

Optimizing DevOps Workflows with Helm Charts and Qovery's New Jobs Feature

Are you tired of the challenges that come with deploying Helm charts on your Kubernetes cluster? Look no further! We just released a game-changing new feature that simplifies the process of deploying Helm charts on Qovery. Our new jobs feature makes deploying Helm charts as easy as a few clicks. Learn more about Helm charts and how to take advantage of this powerful feature now!

5 Proven Ways to Better Protect Customer Data

Technology and innovation have made access to customer data a walk in the park for many businesses. In today’s world, access to customer data is one significant way businesses can provide services that their customers will find acceptable. It helps you provide personalized services and offer customers products and services they will find relevant, which will lead to increased sales conversion. But, unfortunately, most good things have their downsides, and access to customer data is not excluded.

An In-Depth Overview of Azure Storage Accounts & Services

Azure storage accounts offer powerful, cost-effective options for managing your data and applications. With various services such as blobs, queues, files, and tables, you can use Azure Storage to store and access virtually limitless amounts of data effectively. This guide will walk you through all the basics of setting up and using an Azure Storage Account.

Kubecost Vs. Cast.ai: Battle Of The Kubernetes Cost Tools

Kubecost and Cast AI promise real-time Kubernetes cost monitoring. Both deliver this to a good extent. For example, Kubecost provides cost data from within and outside a K8s cluster. It also shares the data in a granular format, such as cost by Kubernetes concepts like namespaces, pods, and custom labels. Cast.ai offers several similar capabilities, including cost savings recommendations, and is currently available for AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and on-prem Kubernetes.

Kubectl Cheat Sheet

In the world of container orchestration, Kubernetes has become the de facto standard. Despite its simplicity in some respects, it has also introduced new levels of complexity in the deployment and management of distributed applications and services. To assist you with understanding the most common kubectl commands & plugins, we've created a cheat sheet as a reference for operations engineers, software engineers, and cloud infrastructure managers who use Kubernetes primarily.

7 Powerful DevOps Tools You Should Know in 2023

Have you ever wished that software development could be faster and focused on quality? Then DevOps may be the answer for your organization. DevOps is a set of practices that combine software development and IT operations to facilitate collaboration between teams. The industry is constantly evolving, and new tools are being introduced daily. With so many options, it can take time to determine which ones are worth your time and money.

Announcing Wildcard SSL Support

Hey everyone, We've got some exciting news to share - wildcard SSL certificates are now available on Cloud 66! If you're not familiar with wildcard SSL certificates, they allow you to secure multiple subdomains under a single certificate. Our options for adding an SSL certificate to your application are now updated to include the following: To set up a Wildcard certificate on Cloud 66, just open your app on your Dashboard and click Network, then SSL Certificate, and then "Add SSL".

Outgrown your ELK self-managed clusters and not sure what to do about it?

As data volume grows, managing your ELK stack can become resource-intensive. Organizations outgrowing ELK are often using multiple different tools, experiencing performance issues, paying too much in log storage, and spending significant time troubleshooting. But while the pain is real, many are hesitant to make a change. The thought of migration yields fears of lost productivity, performance and financial risks, and disappointment in losing some things you love that you worked hard to create.

How digital twins enable data-driven automotive supply chains

The automotive industry is facing one of its biggest revolutions since the advent of automation. In this post, we will go through the Industry 4.0 aspects and how OEMs can turn these challenges into opportunities. To put it simply, the first Industrial Revolution relied on steam power, the second one on electricity and the third one on computers. What about the fourth Industrial Revolution everyone is talking about? I would describe it as a data-driven revolution.

Unsolicited Opinions About the Latest Forrester Wave on AIOps, Part 2 - A Closer Look Into the Evolution of AIOps

Leading industry analyst firm Forrester recently published research titled The Forrester Wave™: Artificial Intelligence For IT Operations, Q4 2022. This is Forrester's summary of the report: You can find my original post regarding this Wave here: "Unsolicited Opinions About The Latest Forrester Wave on AIOps, Part 1." In this post, I’ll provide context on some of the events that led up to this Forrester Wave. These are my observations and opinions, not Forrester’s.

An Overview of Traffic Mirroring Options in Kubernetes

Testing in production carries a lot of risk, like possibly causing downtime for users. However, the advantages of using real user traffic are many, which has led to the popularity of traffic mirroring. Mirroring can be implemented as part of pre-deployment testing, as well as other parts of the developer experience like the development itself. But, how do you get started with it?

The business value of frequent deployments

We’ve written a ton of content about how to unlock the value of frequent deployments for your database as well as applications, from improved coding patterns to strategies for architecting smaller deployments. But the multi-million-dollar question for you and your business is something else entirely: what is the real business value of frequent deployments? That’s the question I’m going to address in this series of three posts.

Getting started with unified observability for Azure in less than 10 minutes using terraform

This video provides a step-by-step guide on how to observe Microsoft Azure environments. This will only take about 10 minutes of working time for you to get a fully configured Elastic Cluster that is actively collecting the data of your Azure environment. Chapters: Additional Resources.

Honeycomb, Meet Terraform

Most SaaS products have nice, organic growth when they work well. Employees log in, they click around and make stuff, then they share links with others who do the same. After a few weeks or months, there are thousand of objects. Some are abandoned, and some are mission-critical. Different people also bring different perspectives, so they name things that are relevant to their role and position in the team, which may be confusing to others outside their realm.

5 Exciting Predictions for SRE in 2023

SRE is a field defined by its constant evolution: from Google’s in-house secret recipe, to the hottest new practice for the biggest enterprise orgs, to a diverse and holistic mentality practiced by orgs of all sizes. Earlier this year, we co-sponsored the Catchpoint State of SRE survey, where we took the temperature of SRE where it was. Now, as we did in 2021 and 2020, we’ll turn to the future to speculate on what 2023 will bring for SRE. ‍

Tanzu Application Platform 1.4 Reduces Developer Toil, Enhances Operations and Security Outcomes

VMware has released new capabilities in VMware Tanzu Application Platform that can continue to elevate the developer and IT operations experiences, as well as ease security management. This blog post outlines the new functionality included in Tanzu Application Platform 1.4, which is generally available now.

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Runbook Automation as a Baseline for Controllability and Observability

Some of the highest priorities for engineers - from NOC Engineers, DevOps & Site Reliability Engineers - are the automation and optimization of their production environments. Many companies today face tough challenges with their Network Operations Centers (NOCs) or production environments. These challenges fall into the hands of engineering teams.

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On-Premises vs Cloud MDM deployment: Key Differences between them

On-premises vs cloud MDM deployment With the rise of SaaS application management, mobile device management (MDM) services have gained popularity among IT professionals. Modern computing environments rely on the efficient use and provisioning of resources. But which one is right for your business: on-premise or cloud MDM deployment? While this may seem like a simple question, there are many factors that come into play when deciding which method to go with. This article discusses the differences between on-premises vs. cloud MDM deployment. It will also present examples, use cases, and pros and cons of these two deployment options.

7 Container Orchestration Tools for Managing Microservices Efficiently

When people hear ‘containers,’ they don’t immediately think about an IT solution that helps businesses create and distribute applications seamlessly. However, the container concept has been around for a long time, helping companies in various industries globally. Containers continue to change the landscape of app development and deployment. This guide below will help you understand containerization and the best orchestration tools to manage containers.

What is MLOps going to look like in 2023?

While AI seems to be the topic of the moment, especially in the tech industry, the need to make it happen in a reliable way is becoming more obvious. MLOps, as a practice, finds itself in a place where it needs to keep growing and remain relevant in view of the latest trends. Solutions like ChatGPT or MidJourney dominated internet chatter last year, but the main question is…What do we foresee in the MLOps space this year and where is the community of MLOps practitioners focusing their energy?

Provision and manage Elastigroup with the new AWS Quickstart Guide

Elastigroup, Spot by NetApp’s first product and core technology, can now be easily provisioned and managed as an AWS Quickstart Guide, created in collaboration with the AWS QuickStart team. Elastigroup for AWS is an IaaS Optimization platform in which the user can provision, manage, and scale EC2 instances to support any elastic application or load balanced workload while leveraging multiple instance–purchasing options.

Understanding Cloud Costs In 2023

During times of economic uncertainty, some companies become extra sensitive to costs, while others look to optimise their spend as they seek out competitive advantage during the downturn. Adopting public cloud services and infrastructure purely as a means of saving costs has long been debunked as a false economy, with many of the savings realised in the form of agility, efficiency, and optimisation, which may at some point turn into revenue gains.

Guest blog post: Don't use your distro's package manager

I have stopped using my Linux distro’s package manager, and you should, too. Maybe I should clarify that. I don’t install software with my distro’s package manager any more. I still upgrade my system. I became influenced by a few different factors. Top among these is something required in certain industries called a change advisory board or committee.

Why Performance And Cost Are Two Sides Of A Coin

In the SaaS world, it’s an accepted fact that engineering teams care most about performance, while finance teams primarily care about costs. The rift between the two teams is so large it caused the birth of a whole new SaaS company department — FinOps — to help them work together. This division of goals often leads executives to wonder which path the company should take.

Applying Lessons Learned from Baking Pizza to Kubernetes Observability

Baking a delicious pizza in a wood-fired oven requires a combination of skill, experience and the right tools. The same is true for achieving optimal observability in a Kubernetes environment. In this post, we'll explore some of the lessons learned from baking pizza in a wood-fired oven and apply them to the world of Kubernetes observability.

Modernizing LinkedIn's Traffic Stack | Sanjay Singh & Sri Ram Bathina

Presented by Sanjay Singh & Sri Ram Bathina (LinkedIn) at HAProxyConf 2022. In this talk, you will learn about LinkedIn's experiments with HAProxy in the past, their current HAProxy use cases, and the plan for replacing the existing stack with HAProxy. You will also see LinkedIn's evaluation process, why HAProxy came out as a winner, and how they are planning to leverage HAProxy’s features to modernize their traffic stack which will make them better prepared for the future.

Hosted StatsD vs. StatsD

When you are designing and building applications, you should consider how to monitor them once they become live. You do not want to be blindsided by errors and degrading performances as you operate them. When your applications fail to provide optimal performance, it can broadly impact your business. Engineers will often be distracted to investigate and fix the issues. Customers will complain. It can eventually hit your bottom line.

Logic App Best practices, Tips, and Tricks: #20 Accessing Runtime Settings (Part I) - Logic App Consumption

In my last blog post, I discussed securing our Logic App. I may return to this topic in the future, but for now, let’s get back once again to developer tricks and tips, and this time to address something that I’m always considering using on my solutions: How to access runtime settings like the Subscription Id or the Resource Group.

JFrog Connect IoT Device Management Solution

JFrog Connect is an all-in-one platform to manage, update, control, monitor and secure remote Linux & IoT devices, at scale, with the click of a button. New products are being developed all the time, and in today's world they are all smart, connected with complex software. Save development time with the first plug and play device management platform for connected devices - with all the necessary tools and features to manage and maintain the product fleet remotely. Including over the air update tools, remote debugging, monitoring and securing.

How we approach integrations at incident.io

If you pick a random SaaS company out of a jar and go to their website, chance are they integrate with another tool. Typically, the end goal of integrations is to meet users in the middle by working with other tools they’re already using on a day-to-day. Put another way, integrations are a strategic business decision. But the question remains: why don’t companies just build a tool with similar functionality in order to make the product stickier?

What are Azure Native Services?

Azure native services are cloud-based solutions that are developed, managed, and supported by Microsoft. These services are designed to help organizations build and deploy applications on the Azure cloud platform, and take advantage of the scalability, security, and reliability of the Azure infrastructure. In this blog post, we’ll take a look at some of the key Azure native services that are available, and how they can be used to build and run cloud-based applications.

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The Life of the Sysadmin: A Patch Tuesday Story

The System Administrator! AKA the Sysadmin. The keeper of the network, computers – well basically all things technology. The one who is hated for imposing complex passwords and other restrictions, but taken for granted when everything works well. They are the first to be called when “facebuuk.com” reports: “domain does not exist”.

Platform.sh is always one step ahead: Announcing PostgreSQL 15, Python 3.11, and Ruby 3.2 for our users

As a developer, it’s important to stay up-to-date with the latest programming languages and updates. But this is no easy task with the fast-paced nature of our techy industry - so we thought we’d do some of the work for you! We’re excited to announce the release of the latest versions of Python, PostgreSQL, and Ruby which our users can already benefit from via our platform.

How do your DevOps plans really measure up?

Digital transformation seems to be on the to-do list of every organization at the moment. Alongside it, DevOps is one of those buzzwords that gets lumped in, with some vague intention of having things automated. If you’re championing a DevOps implementation in your organization, or wish to see where your current processes measure up against your peers, read on.

CircleCI New Feature: An Overview of Container Runner

As many enterprises start to scale utilizing CircleCI’s cloud offering, due to the need for privileged access & controls and unique compute requirements for some jobs, we launched self-hosted runners. Self-hosted runners enable engineering teams to use their own infrastructure for running jobs. A machine runner executes each job with a one to one mapping between a job and a VM launched in the same environment as the machine runner binary.

Get in Front of Delivery Risks by Managing Work in Progress: Turn Your DORA Metrics into Trip Wires

In this live stream on Thursday, January 19 at 1pm PT, learn how Sleuth's new Work in Progress Metrics feature helps you:‍ Sleuth gives software development and engineering teams the most complete and accurate visibility into DORA metrics across your organization and projects. Work-in-progress metrics can also be helpful for communicating execution status to stakeholders, and for tracking if improvement initiatives being implemented are making a difference.

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS End Of Life - keep your fleet of devices up and running

Ubuntu 18.04 ‘Bionic Beaver’ is reaching End of Standard Support this April, also known sometimes as End Of Life (EOL). This distribution of Ubuntu was installed by millions of users and powers up thousands of devices. From kiosks and appliances to IoT devices and robots, 18.04 helped many companies deploy innovations to the world. As with all other Ubuntu LTS releases that reach their end of standard support, Bionic Beaver will transition to Extended Security Maintenance (ESM).

A DWDM Guide: Definition, Benefits, and When You Should Use It

Today’s telecom, cable, and data providers constantly compete to provide the best, most reliable service to customers, while investing in the right technologies to maintain the integrity of data and enable the separation of users. Because of this, service providers often spend countless hours searching for cost-effective, yet future-proof solutions that fit their business needs. This is where DWDM comes in.

Introducing Project and Workspace Access Tokens

A few months ago we introduced Repository Access Tokens which were the first of the new resource-based authentication methods we are introducing to Bitbucket Cloud. Repository Access Tokens enable a convenient, yet secure way to manage access for users to a specific repository. While repository access tokens enable you to allow you to control access at a granular level, they are not scalable.

Supercharging ITSM Collaboration with Mattermost and ServiceNow

Mattermost’s core mission is to provide secure collaboration for technical teams. To do so, we concentrate on providing a collaboration layer that powers key technical and operational workflows for our customers. A prime example of this focus is the new ServiceNow integration for Mattermost, which weaves together key ServiceNow ITSM features such as Incident, Change and Problem management with Mattermost’s rich collaboration features.

Kubecost Vs. OpenCost: What's The Difference?

Kubernetes (K8s) adoption has exploded over the past few years. But it hasn't been easy to monitor, manage, and optimize K8s costs. To provide greater cost visibility into Kubernetes clusters and environments, Kubecost launched in 2019 while OpenCost debuted in 2022. OpenCost has several founding contributors. But it is Kubecost that developed the cost allocation engine that the OpenCost implementation uses. Kubecost also announced the launch of OpenCost on June 2, 2022.

How Bitnami Uses VMware Image Builder to Deploy 60k Apps Per Month and How You Can Do the Same

Have you ever wondered what it takes to build, deploy, and verify 2,000 applications every single day? In this blog post, we will delve into this specific challenge and take a look at how VMware’s Bitnami can dramatically boost productivity by using VMware Image Builder for automating content production. But let’s start from the beginning, and explore what it takes to build and ship software to users.

Best SRE Practices to Help Developers Troubleshoot Kubernetes

With the adoption of Kubernetes rapidly accelerating, many companies struggle with having the right skills within development teams to troubleshoot incidents quickly. Remediation of issues is of the greatest importance to avoid customer disruption. This webinar will introduce several best practices where SREs can take a leadership role, such as: Watch this webinar on-demand to learn how the SRE role can enable development teams to troubleshoot Kubernetes issues quickly and effectively.

2bcloud Supports Stor.ai with AWS Adoption in Multi-Cloud Environment

Stor.ai is a retail market ecommerce solutions provider. Its state-of-the art white label retail platform allows clients to quickly and easily connect to inventory, position their brands to develop customer loyalty, and boost average order value. Running a large cloud-based operation requires a well-provisioned cloud platform capable of managing the load and delivering peak performance.

What Millions of Requests per Second Mean in Terms of Cost & Energy Savings | Willy Tarreau

Presented by Willy Tarreau (HAProxy) at HAProxyConf 2022. Discover the power of HAProxy in this must-watch talk by Willy Tarreau, the developer of the original HAProxy project. Learn how HAProxy has set new world records in performance and scalability and discover how its cutting-edge technology can help you save on costs and energy consumption. With climate change at the forefront of our minds, it's more important than ever to find ways to conserve energy in every aspect of our lives. Join Willy as he explores real-life examples of energy-efficient load balancing.

How to set up a developer portal

If you’re thinking of setting up a developer portal for your software development teams, now is as good a time as any. Developer portals can help your teams start building new projects in a more efficient and streamlined manner. With all the necessary information about available development tools, development environments, service ownership, external APIs, and SDKs present in one place, developers can follow a more systematic approach while building new tools and products.

Azure Cloud Automation with Cloudify

If you are reading this, you’re likely familiar with Azure’s cloud solution advantages. Now think how powerful it would be if you could tie them together with the enhancements of the Cloudify platform. You’ll be able to create one great Azure deployment automation solution. It would take advantage of everything you love about Azure while not getting in the way when you move your workloads between private, public, and hybrid clouds.

CloudHedge is Gartner Cool Vendor in Cloud Native Computing

Iselin, New Jersey – 19th January 2023 – CloudHedge Technologies, an industry pioneer with its end-to-end Continuous Application Modernization platform, OmniDeq™, has been named Cool Vendor in Cloud-Native Computing by Gartner. The report acknowledges CloudHedge’s ability to securely deliver agile digital transformation and modernization journeys for large-scale enterprises, enhancing their efficiency.

How to Assess Current Workloads for a Cloud Migration

Organizations large and small are taking advantage of cloud computing. This can be as simple as leveraging Office 365 or migrating all of their business applications from a data center into the cloud. We’ve all been witness to the explosive growth of cloud applications over the past several years. When organizations start considering migrating business applications to the cloud, there are many considerations, everything from security, compliance, cost, disaster recovery, and more.

Cloud storage pricing - how to optimise TCO

The flexibility of public cloud infrastructure allows for little to no upfront expense, and is great when starting a venture or testing an idea. But once a dataset grows and becomes predictable, it can become a significant base cost, compounded further by additional costs depending on how you are consuming that data.

Maximize Cloud Savings: Advanced Cost Reduction Strategies

Cloud migration can be a powerful way for organizations to reduce costs and improve efficiency. However, simply moving to the cloud is not enough - there are a number of tactics that teams can adopt to maximize cost savings. In this article, I will first explore some common tactics that cloud migration teams use to reduce costs, then share advanced strategies that our most successful customers use to truly take advantage of the cloud for all of its far-reaching benefits.

Guided Kubernetes Troubleshooting: How to Reduce Toil for Dev Teams

This blog post is a how-to guide for Kubernetes troubleshooting. Our vision is that any engineer can keep Kubernetes-based applications up and running smoothly, regardless of their level of Kubernetes expertise and their knowledge of the services in the environment. Right out of the box, StackState aims to monitor, alert and then guide an engineer directly to the problem, helping them remediate the issue quickly.

Heroku Enterprise vs. AWS: What to choose as a business?

When it comes to cloud infrastructure, there are countless options available. From the easy-to-use and scalable Heroku Enterprise to the powerful and versatile AWS, it can be difficult to know which platform is the best fit for your business. However, more and more companies are finding that Heroku Enterprise is not the best choice for their needs and are switching to AWS.

Website downtime and ways to prevent it from happening

In a modern world, every business needs to be present on the Internet, or it will literally fall behind competitors by a huge margin. And this presence in the form of a website should not only be full of useful and high-quality content, but it should also work like a clockwork mechanism from top to bottom. It must be accessible anytime to anyone from anywhere. Of course, such a thing is impossible, because of the maintenance issues, but it shouldn't hold a website owner back from aiming at the highest accessibility time possible.

7 Effective Ways To Reduce Cloud Waste In 2023

Cloud waste has been costing companies billions of dollars for years now. In 2022, organizations spent roughly $490 billion on the cloud. Common estimates suggest that about 30% of cloud spend is wasted, meaning a whopping $147 billion of waste — the most in any year, ever. Organizations are set to spend nearly $600 billion on the cloud in 2023. Could you be wasting money trying to save money? Fortunately, cloud waste is preventable in most cases.

Understanding the 3-2-1 Backup Rule

While data disasters are inevitable, having a planned backup strategy can mitigate its damaging effects. According to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, businesses and organizations should observe the 3-2-1 backup strategy for assured data safety. Superficially, the 3-2-1 backup rule is a backup strategy that increases and diversifies the number of backups used.

How do you connect an Azure Storage Account to Active Directory?

Azure Storage Authentication is the process of verifying the identity of a client that is requesting access to an Azure storage account. Azure Storage supports several authentication options that can be used to secure access to storage accounts, such as: Choosing the best authentication option depends on your requirements such as security, ease of use and ease of integration with existing systems or platforms.

Optimizing Build Time and Getting Results Using Test Splitting

As many enterprises start to scale utilizing CircleCI’s cloud offering, due to the need for privileged access & controls and unique compute requirements for some jobs, we launched self-hosted runners. Self-hosted runners enable engineering teams to use their own infrastructure for running jobs. A machine runner executes each job with a one to one mapping between a job and a VM launched in the same environment as the machine runner binary.

Boosting Developer Welfare: The Power of Community

Since the onset of the pandemic and the changes in working patterns that resulted from it, employee welfare has been boosted to the top of the agenda, with this new mindset seeming to be lasting. According to the UK’s Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, 75% of employees believe senior leaders prioritize well-being as part of business operations.

Containerization vs. Virtualization : understand the differences

Over the last couple of decades, a lot has changed in terms of how companies are running their infrastructure. The days of dedicated physical servers are long gone, and there are a variety of options for making the most out of your hosts, regardless of whether you’re running them on-prem or in the cloud. Virtualization paved the way for scalability, standardization and cost optimisation. Containerization brought new efficiencies.

Mattermost mobile v2 is now generally available

Mattermost mobile v2.0 is a major update to the iPhone and Android apps bringing support for multiple workspaces and intuitive navigation improvements so you can be more productive on the go. We began rolling out the update this week, so you simply need to update to the latest version of Mattermost in the Apple App Store or Google Play Store. The update will be coming to everyone by the end of January.

New Relic Pricing Explained: A 2023 Guide To New Relic Costs

New Relic provides full-stack observability and monitoring. It provides almost every type of system monitoring under one platform. This includes monitoring tools for infrastructure, application performance monitoring (APM), synthetics, user, log, mobile, network, and Kubernetes components. DevOps, security, and business professionals use these capabilities to detect anomalies, analyze root causes, and fix software performance issues.

Efficiently Upgrading Infrastructure with Qovery: Syment's Success Story

Join us as we take a deep dive into the tech journey of Syment, a leading SAAS platform for property management in France. Led by new CTO Florent Blaison, with a wealth of experience in high-traffic platforms and scalability, Syment set out to overcome the limitations of their previous infrastructure. Discover how they transitioned from a mix of manual deployment and AWS's EC2 to the flexibility and scalability of Kubernetes with Qovery.

APIs Impact on DevOps: Exploring APIs Continuous Evolution

An application programming interface (API) is a set of rules and protocols that enables different software applications to communicate and share data and functionality. The concept of an API has been around for a long time. However, APIs as you know them emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s with the rise of the internet and web-based services. As more businesses began to offer online services, the need for a standardized way for these services to interact and share data became apparent.

Challenges and Solutions with Cloud Native Persistent Storage

Persistent storage is essential for any account-driven website. However, in Kubernetes, most resources are ephemeral and unsuitable for keeping data long-term. Regular storage is tied to the container and has a finite life span. Persistent storage has to be separately provisioned and managed. Making permanent storage work with temporary resources brings challenges that you need to solve if you want to get the most out of your Kubernetes deployments.

5 DCIM Software Success Stories as Told by Real Customers

Managing a data center is not easy. Today’s data center professionals must maintain uptime, increase the efficiency of capacity utilization, and boost the productivity of people in more complex and more distributed environments than ever before. Legacy management tools like Excel, Visio, and homegrown systems no longer get the job done for the modern data center. They are hard to use, difficult to maintain, time-consuming, and error-prone.

Using distributed tracing to identify bottlenecks in your app flows

As an engineer building a distributed application, every now and then I need to look for and analyze bottlenecks in our system. There can be several triggers for conducting a bottleneck analysis, for example: In this blog post I’ll share how I’ve been using our own product, Helios, and the power of distributed tracing, to help pinpoint bottlenecks in our system and resolve them fast.

6 Strategic Reasons Why Businesses Need Remote IT Support

Why Remote IT Support: Many businesses across a variety of different sectors are choosing to outsource their technology needs through remote IT support. As a result, you tend to get quicker response times and sector-specific help when you work with remote teams. Additionally, remote work is highly attractive to a lot of skilled professionals, so you are much more likely to work with an expert in the field.

Mattermost v7.7 is now available

Mattermost v7.7 is generally available today. With this latest release, we’ve added new functionality to help teams accelerate productivity while ensuring data and infrastructure control to reduce security and compliance risk. The following new features are included (see changelog for more details).

ITIL vs. DevOps: What is best for your organization?

When it comes to managing IT services, there are two schools of thought: DevOps and ITIL. DevOps is a newer approach, while ITIL has been around for decades. Both have their pros and cons, but which method is the right one for your business? Is ITIL still relevant in an era of cloud computing, artificial intelligence, blockchain and IoT? ‍

DKP 2.4 Takes Multi-Cloud Kubernetes Management to New Heights

With the release of the D2iQ Kubernetes Platform version 2.4 (DKP 2.4), the best Kubernetes platform just got better, particularly the ability to manage Kubernetes clusters across multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments. What makes DKP so special? D2iQ’s business is focused solely on creating a container management platform that is as complete and reliable as possible.

Spot Ocean CD is now live for all Spot users

With frequent software changes for hundreds of services over multiple environments, even a small change made by a developer can generate an unexpected blast radius in production. The standard Kubernetes deployment strategy ignores this modern complexity layer. DevOps organizations that maintain complex solutions have already understood that it’s not scalable and costly to manage.

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish is Now Supported!

Announcing support for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish on all Cloud 66 products (including registered servers). From this point onward, brand-new applications will have Ubuntu 22.04 installed. We will continue to install Ubuntu 20.04 when scaling up servers in an existing application. Don't forget, you can control your target Ubuntu version through your manifest! Ubuntu 22.04 is a Long-Term Support (LTS) release and will receive ongoing app updates and critical security fixes till April 2027.

AWS Elastic Load Balancing: Classic Load Balancer vs. Application Load Balancer

If you use Amazon Web Services, you have two load balancing options for your applications: Classic Elastic Load Balancer (CLB) and Application Load Balancer (ALB). And while choice is always good, the CLB vs. ALB debate can be intimidating. Which load balancer is right for your application? Is ALB better than CLB, or vice versa? This blog explores these questions.

ChatOps Explained and Why DevOps Teams Should Care

ChatOps can speed up organizations’ responses to user needs while relieving support staff of a lot of tedious activities. Many helpdesk or IT tickets are entered for routine end-user questions, such as finding out what hours you’re open or changing a password. However, organizations have also moved toward automating development and required operations through a process popularly known as DevOps.

Why the cloud does not have to be a costly venture

Looking back on the last 18 months, it is abundantly clear that one piece of technology found its moment more than any other: cloud. Essential to modern computing, cloud provides the capacity for businesses to run workloads with the flexibility and scale many firms would struggle to achieve with on-premise infrastructure. According to Flexera’s 2021 State of the Cloud Report, 90% of firms slightly or significantly increased their cloud usage due to the pandemic.

How To Optimise Your Cloud Infrastructure In 2023

With costs rising across the board, business leaders are seeking to become more savvy about their tech expenditure. It’s now well recognised that without proper oversight, cloud costs can easily spiral out of control, but reducing spend isn’t always easy. Understanding when and where to make changes to your infrastructure is what is key to maximising productivity and ROI from cloud infrastructure investments.

Understanding Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

Success in this modern age of digital services and operations is found when businesses are able to prioritize effective digital processes. Because of this, IT teams are constantly looking for ways to improve their IT operations by making them efficient, reliable, and scalable. One way this is accomplished is through site reliability engineering (SRE). LinkedIn listed SRE as the 21st fastest growing job in the U.S. in January 2022. What is SRE, and why is it in such high demand?

How To Reduce Strife Between Engineers And Finance

The conflict between engineers and finance is notorious. Finance thinks engineers just want to build cool products regardless of the cost. Likewise, engineers often feel their every move gets monitored by hawkish finance employees who seem to only care about costs. How can you, as a leader, encourage both teams to work together harmoniously? And what can you do to diffuse the situation when engineers feel attacked for their infrastructure choices?

Cloud optimisation: cut your 2023 cloud spending by two-thirds

Cloud optimisation enables organisations to significantly lower their cloud spending while ensuring the desired performance and necessary compliance. It’s a process that every business should adopt when choosing cloud infrastructure as a foundation for their applications. It’s been proven that applying cloud optimisation best practices leads to a total cost of ownership (TCO) reduction of two-thirds under certain circumstances. But let’s step back for a second.

Getting started with ROS security scanning

It’s a new year, and an especially great time to reflect on the security of your robots. After all, those interested in breaching it are probably doing the same. In previous articles, we discussed ROS security by detailing practical steps for securing your robots on Ubuntu and the challenges the community faces. In this blog post, I’ll give you some strategies, tips and open-source tools you can integrate into your development process today to ramp up the security of your project.

How to Preview and Diff Your Argo CD Deployments

Adopting Kubernetes has introduced several new complications on how to verify and validate all the manifests that describe your application. There are several tools out there for checking the syntax of manifests, scanning them for security issues, enforcing policies etc. But at the most basic case one of the major challenges is to actually understand what each change means for your application (and optionally approve/reject the pull request that contains that change).

How to setup and use Azure SFTP Service with Azure Storage.

Azure SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol) is a service provided by Microsoft Azure that enables you to transfer files securely to and from Azure storage. The service is built on the SFTP protocol, which provides a secure way to transfer files over the internet by encrypting both the data in transit and the data at rest. Azure SFTP allows you to easily automate the transfer of large amounts of data such as backups and log files, to and from your Azure storage account.

IT Workflow Explanation

IT Workflow Automation serves to automates the execution of IT tasks and processes. This can include everything from provisioning new servers and deploying software updates to monitoring and troubleshooting IT systems. Workflow automation helps organizations reduce the time and effort required to perform these tasks by automating manual processes and eliminating the need for manual intervention. It can also improve the accuracy and consistency of these processes, as there is less room for human error.

10 Points of consideration for investing in an Observability Platform for your organization.

10 Points of consideration for investing in an Observability Platform for your organization: Scalability Can the observability platform handle the volume of data that your organization generates? Compatibility Is the observability platform compatible with your organization's existing systems and technologies? Ease of use Is the observability platform user-friendly and easy for your team to adopt and use?

MongoDB Pricing Explained: A 2023 Guide To MongoDB Costs

MongoDB is a popular non-relational database among developers of distributed apps. This Not Only SQL (NoSQL) database system delivers versatility, high scalability, and a flexible querying model. MongoDB is also remarkable for its fault-tolerance, self-healing, and real-time analytics capabilities. But many companies also decry that MongoDB pricing is expensive and complicated. We’ll share how the MongoDB pricing model works.

What is Azure Automation?

As Microsoft Azure continues to be developed and more automation options become available; Azure Automation, Logic Apps, ARM (Azure Resource Manager) and Azure Function Apps to name a few. The question is quickly turning from ‘how do I automate with Azure?’ to ‘what automation type do I use in Azure?’. Across our next few blogs, we will seek to delve into the options available and look to define how they stack up against Azure Automation.

Guide to Platform Engineering: Goals and Best Practices of Platform Engineering Team

Platform engineering is a specialized field that focuses on creating and maintaining the infrastructure and services that support the development and deployment of software applications. In today's fast-paced business environment, organizations need to be able to quickly and efficiently deliver new features and updates to their customers. Platform engineering teams play a crucial role in making this possible by providing a stable and reliable foundation for application development.

MetricFire in 2023

As we welcome a new year, many people set goals, refresh their schedules, and look forward to making the most of 2023. At Metricfire, we think it’s important to reflect on the past and plan for the future. So we’re looking forward to creating goals for our company while sticking to our core values. In this article, we’ll briefly cover some of our company goals for 2023, specifically for our culture, our roadmap, and our growth as a company.

PagerDuty Status Pages Enable Real-Time, Proactive Customer Communication During Incidents

Integrated, Intuitive Feature Saves Time and Money, Aligning Technical and Customer-Facing Teams, Allowing Further Consolidation on to the PagerDuty Platform, and Building Customer Trust During Large-Scale Events.

Easy to manage fine-grained access control and roles

A neatly setup access control telling which user can do exactly what on an incident management platform can save a lot of time and hassle in the future. In the past, Spike.sh had only 2 roles - Admin and Member. The only difference in these roles were that only Admins can remove members. It was fairly simple and most users liked it. However, with larger teams coming onboard, it gets a little difficult to control for admins. So, we have empowered the existing system by adding two more roles.

Kubernetes Preview Environments - Adoption, Use Cases & Implementations

No matter what application you’re building and who your target customers are, everyone can agree that it’s critical to avoid broken deployments. To aid in this goal, many tools and concepts have been invented, with Kubernetes preview environments being one of them. In this post, you’ll get a deeper understanding of how preview environments work, how organizations are using them, and how you can get started yourself.

Software supply chain security: How to audit a security bill of material (SBOM)

A security bill of material (SBOM) is an inventory of the entire building components of a software application. These components include open source libraries, dependencies, commercial components, licenses, patch status, version information, upgrades available, CVEs, etc. Having an SBOM of a codebase or piece of software provides deep visibility into core components that help quickly identify and mitigate the security and licensing risks associated with the software supply chain.

Trust Me - I'm a SASE Solution

As we get ready to wish the term SASE a happy 4th birthday, it seems odd that there is still a great deal of confusion in the market about what SASE really is and how it relates to a ‘Zero Trust’ architecture. For many, SASE is a framework for secure network design; for others, it’s seen more as an architectural approach to delivering Zero Trust. So why do we have this confusion when Gartner defined SASE back in 2019?

Need your own incident post-mortem template? Here's ours

Having a dedicated incident post-mortem is just as important as having a robust incident response plan. The post-mortem is key to understanding exactly what went wrong, why it happened in the first place, and what you can do to avoid it in the future. It’s an essential document but many organizations either haphazardly put together post-incident notes that live in disparate places or don’t know where to start in creating their own post-mortems.

5 best incident management tools of 2023

Put simply, managing incidents—big or small—is good for business. Not only is it a regulatory requirement, but also a factor in your profits. Your customers expect smooth operations, good customer service and protection. A dedicated incident management tool can help protect all of these. While many may think of incidents as an IT or DevOps issue, it’s hard to over emphasize that they can happen in any department.

Unsolicited Opinions About the Latest Forrester Wave on AIOps, Part 1

Leading industry analyst firm Forrester just published The Forrester Wave™: Artificial Intelligence For IT Operations, Q4 2022. If you're not familiar with Forrester Waves, they're similar to Gartner Magic Quadrants. However, one advantage of a Wave versus a Magic Quadrant is the Wave provides clients a way to customize the evaluation to suit their use cases.

Why DevOps needs an AIOps approach?

This need for AIOps was simmering conveniently and gradually reaching its threshold when the pandemic suddenly hit the world, pushing organizations into remote work. The sudden, global-scale change raised challenges for IT operations teams to monitor and detect incidents in a distributed environment and maintain cybersecurity and compliance. While the pandemic pushed some organizations into the reality of remote work, others were already on their way to digital transformation.

Incident Management Tools - Do I Even Need Them?

Software is hard… Maintaining software reliability is harder than it used to be. Software systems have grown dramatically in complexity, as they’re applied in a wider range of applications and environments. Many of which have become fundamental to the everyday function of our society. On the other hand, the pace of software development and release is also faster than ever. Innovating new features faster than competitors has become the key to success in a rapidly-changing market.

A guide to successfully onboarding a developer

The onboarding experience sets the tone for a new developer — beyond the interview process, this will be the developer’s first impression of the company and the job. The onboarding process should be thoughtfully designed and should give the developer the tools they need for success and autonomy. Before you start crafting your onboarding process, think back to your first few days at the organization.

Integrating Cloudsmith with Your Roadie Developer Portal

Customers can now integrate Cloudsmith with Roadie, letting users monitor key Cloudsmith data within the Roadie developer portal. Cloudsmith has just announced an exciting new integration with Roadie, a start-up that provides SaaS for Backstage, a service catalog open-sourced by Spotify that automatically tracks your microservices. Organizations use Roadie to build a software catalog and developer portal for internal systems, centralizing information in one convenient location.

Cycle Podcast | EP 16 | Tom Daly | Simplifying Global Networks + Insights into Startup Investing

In this episode, Jake Warner chats with Tom Daly, CEO at Big Network, and former Senior Vice President of Infrastructure at Fastly. Discussions include his early days as co-founder of Dyn, experience with the build-out of Fastly, and his philosophy behind startup investments.

Overview of Folders in Azure Blob Storage

Azure Blob Storage is a fully managed, scalable, and reliable object storage service provided by Microsoft Azure. One of the key features of Azure Blob Storage is the ability to create and organize data in containers called “folders.” In this blog post, we’ll take a closer look at how folders work in Azure Blob Storage and how you can use them to organize and manage your data.

What is Azure Files and what are they used for?

Azure Files is a fully managed, cloud-based file storage service provided by Microsoft Azure that allows you to share files across multiple servers and platforms. One of the key features of Azure Files is the ability to create and organize files in folders, similar to how you would on a traditional file server. In this blog post, we’ll take a closer look at how folders work in Azure Files and how you can use them to share files with others.

NOAH 2022 Zurich: You Don't Need Another Server

NOAH 2022 Zurich: Keynote by Leah Goldfarb, Environmental Impact Officer at Platform.sh. Climate change and IT, scaling sustainably. Get an overview of climate change, explore how to quantitatively reduce your carbon footprint in the cloud, and explore what actionable information is needed by the client. The ICT sector contributes ~4% of global greenhouse gas emissions – this is more than global aviation.

SUSE Receives 15 Badges in the Winter G2 Report Across its Product Portfolio

I’m pleased to share that G2, the world’s largest and most trusted tech marketplace, has recognized our solutions in its 2023 Winter Report. We received a total of 15 badges across our business units for Rancher, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), SLE Desktop and SLE Real Time – including the Users Love Us badge for all products – as well as three badges for the openSUSE community with Leap and Tumbleweed.

How to Troubleshoot Slow Services in Your Kubernetes Cluster

To get the best performance out of your Kubernetes cluster, SREs and software engineers must have enough knowledge and instruments to find misconfiguration and bottlenecks. At the same time, thanks to Kubernetes’ ever-growing popularity, there is a global shortage of expertise on the platform.

Deploying Hanami 2.0 Ruby application on AWS

The deployment of Ruby on Rails and Rack frameworks is embedded in Cloud 66’s DNA, but we are always interested to see other Ruby frameworks becoming popular, and happy to support developers who prefer to use them instead of Rails. In this post, we’re going to show you how easy it is to deploy a Hanami Ruby application on AWS cloud with Cloud 66. The recent Hanami v2.0 release brought a lot of incremental upgrades to the framework, which made it more mature.

Git vs GitHub

Sophia Diachenko is a PR Manager at Syndicode,a leading digital transformation and products delivery company focused on marketplace creation, SaaS development, and web application development. In her free time, Sophia enjoys broadening her knowledge in the IT sphere. Git and GitHub are two powerful tools widely used in software development. Both can help manage code, but they have different purposes and capabilities.

Maximizing cloud savings: Strategies to optimize your cloud costs

Public cloud users continue to get stung by unexpected costs due to the challenges faced when working with or moving workloads into the cloud. When organizations see this surge in their costs, it typically requires the process of cloud cost optimization to tackle the problem. Cloud cost optimization is the task of minimizing cloud spending by enforcing best practices and appropriate cost-efficient resources.

The 10 Best Multi-Cloud Management Tools In 2023

Over the last few years, more organizations have switched from relying solely on one cloud service provider (CSP) to several. Among the primary reasons for the change are minimizing dependence on a single CSP, preventing vendor lock-in, and providing greater flexibility. Recent trends include using a mix of cloud providers to take advantage of the cost savings several CSPs offer, and using best-of-breed services for different applications, teams, or departments.

The Role of Traffic Replay in Production Traffic Replication

Testing in production is one of the most effective—and risky—ways of testing. The ability to use real-world conditions ensures reliability of tests, as no bugs can appear as a result of misconfigurations of the environment. However, using the same environment as your users also has an obvious downside: any bugs discovered by testing will immediately affect users.

How Augmented Reality Can Change Physical Repair

Augmented Reality for Industry Repair When augmented reality emerged onto the scene, most people anticipated that it would primarily change consumer industries, like gaming. This idea was seemingly confirmed with the explosive popularity of Pokémon Go, the 2016 AR game that saw gamers capture virtual pokemon out in the real world, using only their phone. But some of the most powerful applications of augmented reality are in industry.

I/O Wait Time: A Guide to Improving Linux Performance

I/O wait is a plaguing issue in Linux. Speaking in layman terms, I/O wait is the time taken by the processor (here, CPU) to complete an input service request. Ideally, our CPU doesn't seem to do any work when it is processing one input request at a time, thus the duration between your input and the output provided by the system can be treated as the I/O wait time.

Why SREs need better visibility, not more tools

As a site reliability engineer (SRE), you juggle a lot of moving targets. You keep tabs on your operational environment’s health and maximize service levels, all while trying to scale your business and exceed client expectations. To hold it all together, you’ve likely implemented a hybrid cloud strategy to keep a watchful eye over everything: your on-premises infrastructure, containers, and numerous cloud deployments.

Overcoming The DevOps Shortage: The Power of Tools and Technologies

The DevOps industry has been experiencing rapid growth over the past few years. However, with this growth comes a shortage of skilled DevOps engineers who can efficiently implement and maintain the practices. Organizations are facing the challenge of finding and retaining qualified professionals, but there is a solution. Utilizing the right tools and technologies can empower organizations to overcome the DevOps talent shortage.

Introducing Levitate: 'uplifting' your metrics woes because self-management sucks like gravity

Managing your own time series database is painful. We’ve moved from servers to services, and yet, monitoring metrics data is primitive. Our managed time series database powers mission-critical workloads for monitoring, at a fraction of the cost.

DIY chiselled Ubuntu: crafting your own chiselled Ubuntu base image

In a previous post, I explained how we made our Ubuntu image 15 times smaller by chiselling a specific slice of Ubuntu for.NET developers. In this blog, I will provide step-by-step instructions on customising your chiselled Ubuntu base images for any use case. I don’t believe in a perfect container base image anymore.

Android Geofencing Guide: Track & Secure Devices with AirDroid Business

Many of our customers have already embraced mobile transformation and are sending them out in the field to give employees better productivity. For instance, truck drivers now use Android devices for communication and managing their logistics delivery; health organizations use Android tablets to track the location and health status of patients.

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Top 10 DevOps Challenges & How AIOps Can Help

DevOps was conceptualized to bridge the collaborative gap between developers and IT operations. Previously, developers worked independently of operations teams, shipping their work to the IT team and moving on. DevOps created a shared sense of ownership of a product, allowing development and ops teams to work in tandem for a more streamlined and efficient workflow.

SRE Report 2023: Are we Aligned? Yes. No. Maybe.

Each year of the SRE Report, there’s a trend or anti-pattern that leaps out and makes us pause and reflect. Last year, for example, we found a huge drop in global toil levels. With the whole world working from home for a full year, it made sense that global toil levels would drop, right? But this year, despite the great reopening underway, toil levels dropped even further - it's a paradox, one which no doubt will require its own scrutiny.

Introducing CloudZero Support For New Relic: Enabling A More Efficient Approach To Observability

As a leader in observability and application performance monitoring (APM), New Relic empowers engineers with a data-driven approach to planning, building, deploying, and running great software. Last month, we announced support for New Relic on the CloudZero platform. With this new functionality, customers can gain visibility into their New Relic spend, combine it with any other IT or infrastructure spend, and achieve a complete view of business dimensions — such as products and customers.

9 Go-To SysAdmin Password Generators

System Administrators use various tools to get the job done. Among that tech stack, SysAdmin password generators are an absolute must. However, there are a lot of options to choose from, and making the right choice can often be a daunting task. Similar as we did a while ago with enterprise password managers, let’s review the favorites, and break their pros and cons down into digestible information.

The Most Reliable WordPress Hosting Providers. The Study Based on Real Outage Data

According to data from W3Techs, more than 40% of all websites are built on WordPress. Therefore, it’s no surprise that WordPress hosting has skyrocketed in popularity recently and hosting providers have proliferated. With so many choices, it’s important to understand just how reliable WordPress hosts are, especially when it comes to downtime. Web hosting downtime can have significant consequences such as business loss, brand damage, and missed opportunities.

What Databases Taught Me About Scaling Observability

I recently attended a virtual event and heard the speaker comment, “Relational databases don’t scale.” To my ears, this is about as silly a statement as saying, “No one can eat 26 hot dogs in 12 minutes” right before Kobayashi shows up and eats 50. In my experience, relational databases scale when they’re placed in the hands of someone who knows what they’re doing. Just imagine if Kobayashi was your data architect!

It's Time To Stop Pitting On Prem and Cloud Against Each Other

Most sentences that include both on premises and cloud usually put the word “or” between them, or perhaps “vs.” But most enterprises operate in the world of “and.” In other words, they have workloads on premises and in the cloud—and that little three-letter word makes a world of difference.

The ten habits for highly successful compliant database DevOps

Database DevOps has come of age. Now seen as a key technical practice which can contribute to the successful implementation of DevOps, it stops the database being a bottleneck and makes releases faster and easier. Conversely, perhaps, the automation and audit trails it introduces can help to protect personal data within databases and make compliance part of the same process rather than an additional time-consuming step outside it.

Komodor Goes Freemium

I’m so excited to share with the world that today Komodor has officially transitioned to a freemium model, and made all of its great features available to small teams for FREE! Now, every developer can use Komodor to observe, manage, and troubleshoot Kubernetes with ease. By simplifying K8s operations and injecting our own expertise into the product we’ve created a better dev experience that reduces toil and sparks joy.

Lessons from the CircleCI Security Incident

In some respects, security and reliability are competing priorities. Security controls may reduce reliability, and responding to security incidents may require mission-critical systems to be paused or shut down until they're secure. The recent security incident involving CircleCI, however, shows that it's not always necessary to choose between prioritizing security or reliability.

Chiselled Ubuntu containers: the benefits of combining Distroless and Ubuntu

In this blog, I explain the idea behind Distroless container images, which inspired us to create chiselled Ubuntu images — adding the “distro” back to distro-less! In a follow-up blog, I will then provide a step-by-step example of how you can create your own chiselled Ubuntu base container images, built for your specific needs.

Unified IT Operations Management: What It Is and Why It Matters

When IT teams and departments aren’t on the same page, they unintentionally create blockers and other issues that negatively affect the entire organization. To prevent these troublesome issues from occurring, CIO recommends looking into a few ways to make IT operations more efficient, such as automating processes or adopting a new IT approach.

Longhorn 1.4 - Starting A New Year With A New Release

The team are excited to start the new year with the latest release for Longhorn 1.4. This latest version is packed with new features and enhancements designed to help make cloud native enterprise storage simpler and more accessible to the cloud native community. For existing users of Longhorn, this latest release is focused on helping you build better value and resiliency across your storage strategy.

How To Incorporate FinOps Into The DevOps Lifecycle

FinOps, or the practice of managing a company’s cloud computing costs, and DevOps, the process of efficiently building applications in the cloud, should ideally go hand-in-hand. Engineers with a streamlined development process and a cost-conscious mindset can produce functional products with great margins and a high potential for scalability. However, incorporating FinOps into the DevOps lifecycle, and vice versa, isn’t always easy.

Power-up your local development with DDEV

Have you ever had to set up and/or maintain a local development environment using Docker that mirrors your production environment as much as possible? Setting-up and supporting such a docker-based local environment is no easy feat! Common problems include: performance issues, broken dependencies, broken relationships between your services and uncontrolled updates of your docker images, among many other issues. So, the question is, what can we do about that?

An Introduction to Service Installer for VMware Tanzu

Service Installer for VMware Tanzu enables quick, repeatable deployments of Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations on a variety of cloud platforms. This video provides a high-level introduction to Service Installer for VMware Tanzu, including its capabilities, form factors, benefits, and availability.

Announcing HAProxy Data Plane API 2.7

HAProxy Technologies is proud to unveil the 2.7 release of HAProxy Data Plane API. This release was a huge undertaking, and as with the 2.6 release, we focused on extending support for configuration keywords. We are happy to announce that with this release we support all HAProxy configuration keywords in the Data Plane API. Along with enhanced keyword coverage, we’ve added the ability to specify multiple named defaults sections through the API.

Efficiently Managing Multiple Environments Using GitLab CI

GitLab CI is a powerful tool for managing the software development and deployment process. It allows you to define and automate build, test, and deployment pipelines and provides features such as version control, collaboration, and continuous integration. However, while GitLab CI is an excellent tool for managing a single environment, it can have some limitations when it comes to managing multiple environments, especially dynamic environments.

Power-up Your Local Development with DDEV | Platform.sh

Have you ever had to set up and/or maintain a local development environment using Docker that mirrors your production environment as much as possible? Setting-up and supporting such a docker-based local environment is no easy feat! Common problems include performance issues, broken dependencies, broken relationships between your services and uncontrolled updates of your docker images, among many other issues. So, the question is, what can we do about that?

Spot Eco: Introducing a faster, more flexible dashboard

With Eco’s automated reservation management, maximizing savings on your cloud bill and increasing your team’s bandwidth is easy. The new dashboard now includes responsive modular components and an improved commitment filter, so tracking savings and monitoring your environment is even easier.

Kubescape brings a new level of security to Charmed Kubernetes

The popular open-source platform Kubescape by ARMO has been recently announced as a fully managed operator called a Charm for Canonical’s Charmed Kubernetes distribution. This collaboration between Canonical and ARMO is exciting for the solution it enables for end users, ultimately resulting in hardened and more secure Kubernetes environments.

Top 9 DevOps Monitoring Tools in 2023

DevOps has evolved in terms of its tools, techniques, and culture. Software developers can gain a completely new perspective when operations and development work together. The tech sector now depends heavily on DevOps. It is essential in enterprises, from software delivery to project planning. Businesses in DevOps employ a variety of monitoring tools for a range of activities, including development, testing, and automation.

Monitor Tanzu Kubernetes Grid on vSphere with Datadog

With vSphere and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG), VMware enables enterprise organizations to combine the economic advantages of virtual machines (VMs) with the agility, portability, and scalability provided by Kubernetes. vSphere is VMware’s platform for the provisioning and management of VMs.

Best Practices to Ensure Sustainable, Enterprise-Wide Open Source Software Adoption

Over the past two decades, adoption of open source software (OSS) among enterprises has become commonplace. In fact, because of the many advantages of open source, it is now almost impossible to find a business that does not rely on OSS. And with the proliferation of modern cloud native apps and microservices, this is only more true. Modern applications are built with open source, and you wouldn’t want to do it any other way.

JFrog Quick Tip How to install and connect the JFrog CLI

With the JFrog CLI, you have access to the functions of the JFrog Platform, such as Artifactory and Xray. In this way, for example, the extended security functions of Xray can be made available directly in a terminal on a laptop. In this quick tip, I will show you where to get the JFrog CLI, install it and connect it to your platform. This works with the free tier, the Enterprise Trial, and all other subscriptions and on-prem installations.

Cloud Monitoring: Create custom notification channels

Are you looking to learn how to send alerts from Cloud Monitoring to your custom notification service? In this video, we share the different ways of processing notifications from Cloud Monitoring. Watch this video to learn the steps involved in sending the notifications from Cloud Monitoring using Cloud Run to your custom notification service, including a description of the sample notification service and of the Cloud Run code.

Terraform With Multiple Environments: Key Benefits & Use Cases

Terraform is one of the most popular infrastructures as code (IaC) tools that allow users to define, configure, and deploy infrastructure resources in a safe, predictable, and repeatable manner. Using declarative configuration files, users can deploy resources across a variety of infrastructure providers, including public cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, as well as on-premises environments and third-party services.

How To Manage Multiple Environments With Terraform in 2023

Managing multiple environments with Terraform can be a complex and time-consuming task. An environment refers to a specific configuration or set of resources within a system, such as development, staging, or production environment. These environments often have different requirements and configurations, and managing them separately can be challenging.

How to use the Grafana Ansible collection to manage Grafana Agent across multiple Linux hosts

Anyone who is trying to set up monitoring for multiple machines knows how tough it can get to manage multiple Grafana Agents across them. To make things easier, we recently added the Grafana Agent role to the Grafana Ansible collection, which will help users manage the Agent across multiple Linux hosts. (Need to know how to get started with the Grafana Ansible collection for Grafana Cloud?

Civo January 2023 Newsletter

With less than one month to go, we are counting the days until our first Civo Navigate event in Tampa Bay, Florida. Mark Boost, CEO of Civo, recently explored the motivation behind Civo Navigate, what attendees can expect, and the industry reaction in our blog. If you're joining us for the event, why not check out the Synapse Florida Summit? You can use code "CIVO" to get a 10% discount on all Synapse Summit tickets here.

Simplifying Kubernetes DevSecOps Through Platform Engineering

DevSecOps–short for development, security, and operations–is a trending practice that introduces security testing, triage, and risk mitigation as early as possible in the software development lifecycle, rather than bolting on security in the final stages. DevSecOps requires a shift (also known as “shift-left”) in culture, process, and tools across development, security, and operations teams to make security a shared responsibility.

Playbooks: A new superpower for designers

From one designer to another, you should know why Playbooks is a fantastic addition to your design tool belt. Playbooks were designed with technical workflows in mind, from incident response to release management, but its flexibility makes it a perfect fit for any repeated process. I love it for creating reusable templates of design checklists and an excellent way to do design review sign-off.

Failure Analysis: Engineering incidents are a bigger problem than you think

Engineering incidents can be quite harmful for companies, both in terms of financial costs and reputational damage. In some cases, engineering incidents can even put people's lives at risk, which can have serious legal and moral implications for the company involved.

Ping Command: A Beginner's Guide

One of the most continually used tools by network administrators is the ping command. Over a half-century has passed since it was unleashed, and unsurprisingly, it has proven effective in troubleshooting networks. Testing the availability of a networking device on a network (mostly computers) can be done by employing the ping command. In order to check the connectivity between hosts and servers, the PING (Packet Internet Groper) command is utilized.

CircleCI Breach: How to Rotate All Stored Secrets ASAP

Yesterday, CircleCI, a Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) service, notified the world it had been breached via a critical advisory from its CTO. As a major software delivery pipeline service, CircleCI users store myriad credentials for various services in CircleCI’s “Secrets Store” infrastructure.

Critical Metrics and Alerts in the Continuous Delivery Process

Continuous delivery is a software development approach in which code changes are automatically staged for production release. A foundation for modern application development, continuous delivery extends continuous integration by automatically deploying code changes to test and production environments after the build phase. When properly implemented, developers have deployable build artifacts that have passed a standardized testing process and can be deployed to environments as needed.

Puma + Sleuth = The Swiss Army Knife of Deployment Pipeline Orchestration

Michael Gaskin from Puma and Dylan Etkin from Sleuth discuss how Michael's team uses Sleuth to orchestrate its entire deployment pipeline and show engineering value, specifically for a major engineering initiative -- moving from a monolithic packaged software system to a new headless front end commerce solution.

A Fully Argo-Based Ecosystem For Continuous Delivery and Deployment

Better DevOps makes for more efficient engineering teams and more reliable releases, and when it comes to DevOps, it doesn’t get better than GitOps. According to DevOps-As-A-Service: One of the many goals of DevOps is to reduce Time To Value (TTV) and to provide faster feedback while enabling developers to easily self-service or not have to engage to get a service at all.

Realtime performance alerts for cloud desktops

The thermostat for the first floor of my house is located right behind me in my home office. I probably walk by it a dozen times a day, but I only look at it if I am feeling cold or warm to check to see if the temperature is set to the correct value. In Massachusetts, hot and cold are seasonal but can vary a lot day to day so checking occurs more often than you would think.

DataOps vs. DevOps - Similar or Completely Different?

Over the past several years, there has been a big focus on streamlining infrastructure operations. Many organizations have begun using DevOps principles in their software development and operations activities. We've also seen a new Ops in town recently: DataOps. Good things come from new methods to help teams collaborate across an organization.

Managed Service Providers (MSPs): How Can They Help Scale Your Business?

As a business owner, there are several functions you must ensure are running efficiently to enhance the success of your venture. Information technology (IT) plays a vital part in your company. However, it changes constantly, making it difficult for you to keep up given your other obligations. This causes your venture to miss out on the advanced technologies and solutions that help you stay relevant, competitive, and profitable.

The A to Z of Devices You Can Remote Control

When most professionals hear the term “mobile device management,” they generally assume that an MDM can only remote control company-issued phones. Several years ago, this idea may have been accurate. But as the digital devices in our world have exploded in number, so, too, has the umbrella of what an MDM can remotely control. Now the right MDM can remote control practically any device with a screen and an interface.

5 open source projects to contribute to in 2023 | Open Source Matters

Welcome to Open Source Matters, where we cover the latest developments in open source technology. In this special edition, we’re covering 5 open source projects you should consider contributing to in 2023. I’m your host, Ben Lloyd Pearson — now, in no particular order, let’s dive in!

WSL and Ubuntu: 2022 year in review

In 2022, Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) exploded in popularity, with millions of users taking advantage of the ability to develop, create and administrate inside a native Linux environment deeply integrated with Windows. This is thanks in large part to continued investment from Microsoft, consistently rolling out new features and updates for the platform on both Windows 10 and Windows 11.

Cloud security: How remote work created a new problem

In 2020, remote work exploded with the start of COVID-19 as businesses scrambled to stay productive and competitive amidst health concerns and quarantines. During the pandemic, close to 70% of workers were working from home. Currently, 4.7 million people work remotely at least half the time in the US, and 62% of workers claim to work remotely at least occasionally.

Amazon Sagemaker Pricing Explained: A Guide For 2023

Amazon SageMaker makes it easy to prepare data for machine learning (ML) and then train, deploy, and modify ML models. SageMaker is a fully managed service that automates much of the ML lifecycle. So, if you want a single partner to help you through all stages of your Artificial Intelligence (AI) lifecycle, SageMaker might be the answer. Perhaps more important for this post is the promise that Amazon SageMaker can reduce your machine learning model costs. But does SageMaker pricing reflect this?

The State of AIOps: A New Years' Message from Chief Moo Phil Tee

Well, that was fast! Another year has come and gone. It is safe to say 2020, ‘21 and ‘22 were exceptional, and only sometimes for good reasons. But I take heart in society’s steady progress toward digital maturity through it all. Nearly 100% of IT leaders say the pandemic accelerated their organization’s rate of digital transformation.

Top 5 challenges in Hyper-V performance monitoring that you need to know

Network management strategy never goes without virtualization being an integral part of it, as virtualization is the key to improving network efficiency and resource availability. Virtualization also comes with ample benefits, such as minimized downtime, reduced functional costs, and improved productivity.

A better way: 3 incident response areas prime for automation

By automating some rote parts of incident response, you reduce decision fatigue and help responders get to solving the problem faster with less stress. In this post, we talk about three areas of the incident response process that are prime for automation.

How communication can make or break your incidents

In this episode, Pete and Lisa discuss why great communication (both internally and externally) is essential to the success of any incident management process. From keeping your wider team in the loop to minimise disruption, to using customer communication to strengthen your brand when things go wrong, the team share their experiences and top tips for having a transparent incident communication culture.

Kubernetes Monitoring: 4 Data Types to Increase Insights

Having a deep understanding of a Kubernetes cluster is important: the right insights allow you to monitor the performance and health of the cluster, which is necessary for ensuring that applications are running smoothly and that any potential issues can be identified and addressed quickly. As your Kubernetes cluster develops, so does the need for monitoring and troubleshooting.

DevOps Security: Challenges and Best Practices

With the shift from traditional monolithic applications to the distributed microservices of DevOps, there is a need for a similar change in operational security policies. For example, how do you secure a disparate number of micro-systems operating with multiple access credentials across a multi-level organization? DevSecOps (Devops security) answers this question by integrating security at every level of your development process.

The Optymyze CEO Explains 5 Ways To Automate Your DevOps Workflow

The phrase "time is money" couldn't be more accurate in the business. Increasing efficiency and productivity can considerably impact the bottom line for organizations that rely heavily on their development and operations teams. You can reduce manual steps, save time and money, and improve quality overall by automating specific tasks in your DevOps workflow. Here are five ways entrepreneurs like the Optymyze CEO use automation to enhance their DevOps workflow.

The 7 Best FinOps Blogs, Books, And Other Resources

There are almost as many reasons for learning FinOps practices as there are resources available to learn from. Maybe you operate a SaaS company, for example, or you're looking for a job in FinOps. The FinOps field grows in importance every time cloud services and their associated costs become more complex — which can feel like every single day. Regardless of your situation, you’ll need high-quality FinOps resources that offer up-to-date materials and in-depth information.

Hybrid cloud infrastructure modernisation

Public clouds enabled digital transformation at unprecedented speed. But their operational costs over time can be exacting as compute needs increase. Hybrid clouds emerged as an alternative to gain the benefits of both worlds: private infrastructure that allows for lower operational expenditures and tighter control, and public clouds that can scale with ease.

Microservices Monitoring: Cutting Engineering Costs and Saving Time

As businesses are planning for 2023, many are adopting a more conservative mindset when it comes to their resources. In light of the recent market fluctuations and the uncertainty of if and how a recession will affect them, they are looking for ways to cut costs and increase their efficiency. But despite the spending slowdown, development velocity can’t slow down.