For software developers around the world, Git is considered to be one of the most popular version control systems, if not the most popular one. Git allows you to track changes to your codebase and collaborate with other developers. But sometimes, managing Git to perform large or complex operations in your repositories can be overwhelming. Using a Git GUI can make all the difference. Let’s explore the advantages of using GitKraken Client with your repositories hosted on GitHub.

Among the system integrators that have chosen the D2iQ Kubernetes Platform (DKP) is Dinohead, an IT services and consulting firm that applies high levels of engineering expertise to commercial and government projects. After choosing the D2iQ Kubernetes Platform (DKP) as the basis for its container management solutions, Dinohead created production-ready Kubernetes management solutions for three U.S. Air Force Software Factories.

When our CEO and co-founder Tomer Levy delivered his “Observability is Broken” presentation at last year’s AWS re:Invent, he highlighted numerous challenges faced by today’s organizations as they seek to advance their observability practices. Of the six individual points that he noted, two specifically dealt with the current shortage of available engineering expertise, with another two focused on data overload.

Canonical began the development of Ubuntu Core in 2014, to create a fully-containerised platform for IoT. In Ubuntu Core, we use the same kernel container technology that Docker and LXC are built on, to put every component of the system into a secure sandbox, with well-defined upgrade and rollback. We did this to enable autonomous connected Internet of Things devices to receive updates which they could apply without human intervention, to address security and business needs at the edge.

This Kubernetes Architecture series covers the main components used in Kubernetes and provides an introduction to Kubernetes architecture. After reading these blogs, you’ll have a much deeper understanding of the main reasons for choosing Kubernetes as well as the main components that are involved when you start running applications on Kubernetes. This blog series covers the following topics.

Although the causes and solutions for incidents vary widely, most incidents follow a similar timeline from declaration to resolution. We call the period of time it takes to move from one phase or milestone of an incident to the next cycle time.

HAProxy Fusion Control Plane gives you power to simplify, scale, and secure your HAProxy Enterprise infrastructure using a centralized orchestration solution, making it easier to extend HAProxy Enterprise’s security and performance across on-premises and cloud-hosted applications. With the release of version 1.1, HAProxy Fusion is more secure, more flexible, and even easier to use.

HAProxy 2.8 is now available, and HAProxy Enterprise 2.8 will be released later this year. Register for the live webinar HAProxy 2.8 Feature Roundup to learn more about this release and participate in a live Q&A with our experts.

Kubernetes is a popular open-source container orchestration platform. It is highly configurable and feature-rich, but it also requires a deep understanding of containerization. When you are running Kubernetes in production, you need to account for cluster monitoring and logging, governance, and security. In this article, you will learn about Kubernetes security, including pro tips to help you handle architecture concerns, dependencies, and container vulnerabilities.

Networks today span the world and provide many connections between geographically disparate data centers, and public and private clouds. This creates a variety of network management problems. If your network is not working properly, it can be very difficult or even impossible to get the most productive or correct operation of your applications. A sophisticated network requires constant monitoring using the right tools and creating a network performance monitoring strategy.

When you set up on-premise digital infrastructure, it is crucial to enable your devices to communicate with each other. The devices on your network should be able to send and receive data packets to handle requests and send responses back to callers. One of the components that allow data transmission to the proper destination is the network switch. The network switch plays an important role in distributing data packets to devices.

When you send an email or load a website, you probably never think about how the data gets from your computer to the server that needs to process it. But something does have to decide how the data will move across the vast expanse of the Internet – and, in particular, which of the virtually infinite number of potential routes your data will take as it moves from your device to a server and back again.

One of the value propositions of Platform.sh is to offer greener hosting. By choosing cloud hosting instead of on-premise hosting, you are selecting a greener way to host your applications and websites. In addition, when creating a project, you have the option to choose the greenest region to host it. How?

In a recent meetup I hosted alongside Kunal Kushwaha, we discussed Cilium, an eBPF-powered open-source cloud-native networking solution that offers security, observability, scalability, and superior performance. Throughout this blog I will explore how the increased usage of Kubernetes has led to the need for advanced networking, security, and observability solutions. This will allow us to take a closer look at how Cilium can benefit Kubernetes users.

In 21st-century business, computing is what makes daily operations, competitive advantage, and strategic growth possible. The foundation that enables this is a hybrid cloud infrastructure that supports business requirements, delivers a suitable user experience, and stays on budget. Mastering the ABCs of infrastructure performance management (IPM) will put you on the road to long-term success.

Engineering organizations that ship fast have Observability as part of their core DNA.

Data center consolidation involves reducing the number of servers, storage, network systems, racks, or entire data center sites to improve IT efficiency and create a more streamlined environment with lower space, power, and cooling requirements. As businesses migrate their workloads to the cloud or virtualize servers, the need for physical space decreases. This prompts companies to downsize their footprint, utilizing existing resources more and alleviating data center management challenges.

Azure Storage offers a robust set of data storage solutions including Blob Storage, Queue Storage, Table Storage, and Azure Files. A critical component of these services is the Shared Access Signature (SAS), a secure way to provide granular access to Azure Storage services. This article explores the intricacies of Azure Storage SAS Tokens.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) is commanding conversations these days, a never-before-seen system that’s captured many millions of users since its debut in November 2022. A machine learning innovation that creates content of all kinds (and that’s just the beginning), generative AI also comes up with new product designs and optimizes business processes. We have only begun to exploit and understand this disruption.

Migrating to a cloud model would reduce costs and let me focus on consumption pricing; reduce complexity by moving backend software and hardware support to the provider; and increase agility by letting my developers use all those nifty new tools that were emerging daily from cloud providers. The data center was heading the way of the dinosaurs! All was good. Everyone was happy. Well, in theory anyway. Until reality kicked in.

The SLA definition is - An SLA is a written contract outlining quantifiable service quality standards between a service provider and a client. Typically, it includes response times, uptime, and error reporting.

The Uptime Institute recently released its Annual Outage Analysis 2023 report. Overall, the report highlights the increasing costs, frequency, and duration of outages, the prominent role of cloud and digital services in outages, the shortcomings of service providers, and the need to address human error and management failures. It also underscores the ongoing challenges of handling failures in complex distributed architectures.

After in Part 1 we have covered the first critical steps to complete before migrating to Amazon Web Services (AWS)- Cloud Adoption Readiness Assessment (CARA). We will continue Once you’ve assessed your readiness, it’s essential to develop a comprehensive cloud strategy aligning with your business goals and objectives. The strategy should cover key areas – including security, reliability, compliance and operational excellence.

For today’s software organizations security has never been more top of mind. On one side there is the present and growing threat of being hacked by malicious actors, set out in Crowdstrike’s recent Global threat report. And, on the other, there is a wave of cybersecurity regulation from the government to mitigate such cybersecurity vulnerabilities.

This week I’ve been reading through the recent judgment from the Swedish FSA on the Swedbank outage. If you’re unfamiliar with this story, Swedbank had a major outage in April 2022 that was caused by an unapproved change to their IT systems. It temporarily left nearly a million customers with incorrect balances, many of whom were unable to meet payments.

The rapid technological advancements in the last decade led to a massive migration of data and applications from on-premise environments to the cloud. While this cloud migration trend dominated the IT world, a recent paradigm shift has emerged that’s moving in the opposite direction – ‘Cloud Reverse Migration’ or ‘Cloud Repatriation’.

Understanding Metrics, Logs, Events and Traces - the key pillars of observability and their pros and cons for SRE and DevOps teams.

It feels great writing this. It's hard to believe that we have been working on Spike.sh full-time for 3 years now. It's been the most rewarding experience of my life. A big thank you to all of our users and your constant feedback, which has only made Spike.sh better month on month. We are - Over the years, we have always kept our heads down and built. During this entire process, we have learnt a huge deal of things when it comes to incidents and how they are being managed.

The use of virtualization in modern computing is becoming indispensable. Virtualization allows users to operate numerous operating systems on a single physical machine, which boosts productivity, lowers costs, and makes maintenance easier. But It's crucial to conduct periodic checks on a Linux virtual machine to make sure it's operating smoothly and effectively.

If you’re looking for a short answer on OpenSearch vs Solr, here’s a flow chart: We normally recommend the one you (or your team) already know or the prefer because, for most projects, there’s not that much in it in terms of features. Both search engines are well supported and have strong communities behind them. That said, there are significant differences, too.

Generative AI projects like ChatGPT have motivated enterprises to rethink their AI strategy and make it a priority. In a report published by PwC, 72% of respondents said they were confident in the ROI of artificial intelligence. More than half of respondents also state that their AI projects are compliant with applicable regulations (57%) and protect systems from cyber attacks, threats or manipulations (55%). Production-grade AI initiatives are not an easy task.

Location-based marketing has been around for a while. Marketers have used ZIP codes to send personalized marketing messages to target audiences. However, these tactics are limited. For example, you can’t trigger ads in real-time or at the moment of highest intent. But what if you could target the right customers at the right place and time? Enter geofencing.

As we continue to journey through 2023, one of the highlights in the tech world has been the evolution of Azure Storage, Microsoft’s cloud storage solution. Azure Storage, known for its robustness and adaptability, has rolled out several exciting updates this year, each of them designed to enhance user experience, improve security, and provide more flexibility and control over data management.

What's the difference between SREs and Platform Engineers? How do they differ in their daily tasks?

As a mobile game developer, there are many components of your game that you need to monitor. Everything from the servers that are hosting your game, to your best players, and your best-converting actions. That’s a lot of data, and it’s hard to know how to get the most out of that data. This article will look at the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) you need to monitor, the best tools for monitoring these metrics, and how to handle this data in the most effective way.

Tidal CEO, David Colebatch, had the privilege of sitting with Marcus Pozzan, Senior Partner Account Manager for ISVs at AWS Canada for the Canadian Pension Investment Funds Executive Briefing Day on April 18, 2023.

In our previous blogs on Capturing Application State and using Ephemeral Containers for Debugging Kubernetes, we discussed the value of being able to deploy specific tools to gather diagnostics for later analysis, while also providing the responder to the incident the means to resolve infrastructure or application issues.

In the ever-evolving landscape of cloud computing, data redundancy is no longer just an option but a must-have feature for any business looking to fortify its data storage and accessibility. One of the most recent additions to the world of data redundancy is Azure Files’ Geo-Redundancy feature, a 2023 release that’s set to take the world of cloud storage by storm.

As we announced at Cephalocon 2023 in Amsterdam, Canonical has started to make container images for Ceph available. We received lots of questions at the booth about what it means to the average Ceph user who has or wants to deploy Ceph on Ubuntu. In this blog post, we will cover the benefits to users who are running containerised Ceph on Ubuntu, and specifically how these images can provide an improved security posture.

Cloud and cluster sprawl is a problem affecting numerous organizations, undermining the efforts that led to cloud-native Kubernetes deployments and resulting in wasted resources, inefficient operations, and poor return on investment. The best way to bring cloud and cluster sprawl under control is through centralized multi-cloud and multi-cluster fleet management. There are a number of reasons why the D2iQ Kubernetes Platform (DKP) provides unmatched fleet management capabilities.

Since its inception in 1988, the traceroute has undergone several variations. You might be wondering, ‘Why so many?’ The answer is simple: achieving traceroute functionality has been a balance between security and utility. Whenever malicious actors exploited firewall and router vulnerabilities, their vendors responded with fixes and solutions which impacted the traceroute algorithms.

Legacy systems and point solutions are part of any business. And while they have their history and benefits, it’s critical to find a balance for your organization. IT teams have been acclimated to disparate event management and monitoring tools. Now, with massive and rapidly increasing data flow, this disconnect is slowing and paralyzing IT teams.

For many data center professionals, the daily operations of a data center require a lot of repetitive manual data entry tasks. Manually entering data about data center assets over and over again is not only time-consuming, but it risks inaccurate information due to human error. However, there is a new way forward.

It is an old cliche adage, but there is no better statement than “a picture is worth a thousand words” that explains the effectiveness of visuals to deliver a message. Especially, in the data domain where a raw message often exists in numbers, visualizing graphs and charts is the best way to share information. When it comes to visualizing metrics from Graphite, there is no solution that can beat Grafana.

When it comes to identity and access management solutions, two names that often come up are Active Directory (AD) and Azure Active Directory (AAD). While many people are familiar with AD, AAD is still a relatively new concept to some. In this article, we will take a deep dive into both directories and explore their similarities, differences, pros, cons, and everything in between.

In the modern digital age, the migration of data and applications to the cloud has been a significant trend, prompted by the promise of increased efficiency, scalability, and reduced IT costs. Cloud services such as Microsoft’s Azure Cloud have become increasingly popular, offering a host of services including computing power, storage solutions, and advanced analytics.

Static application security testing (SAST) involves analyzing source code to identify and address potential security vulnerabilities. Using SAST early in development identifies threats before they can affect a live environment. SAST is particularly important for continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. These pipelines automate the integration of new code changes into the main codebase and deploy applications to production environments.

Streaming Aggregation and Recording Rules are two ways to tame High Cardinality. What are they? Why do we need them? How are they different?

As the trend toward microservices-based architectures continues to gain momentum, it’s becoming increasingly clear that distributed tracing will be a crucial tool for monitoring and debugging these complex systems in the future. When designing a microservices-based architecture, breaking extensive services into smaller, more manageable components is standard practice. Communication between these components becomes crucial, but finding the root cause can be challenging when issues arise.

Navigating compliance requirements can be complex because there are so many of them, and there is a good chance that at least one set of standards applies to you. Standards can be for specific sectors, like The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) for healthcare, or may apply more generally to organizations across industries, like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Microsoft Azure is often hailed for its “limitless potential” and “unlimited possibilities”. But what does that mean in practical terms? How can Azure transform your business operations and why is it worth your attention? In this article, we’ll delve into these questions and illustrate the value of Azure through four key applications that can enhance your business operations and provide tangible benefits.

Site Reliability Engineering is a process of automating IT infrastructure functions, including system management and application monitoring using software tools. It is used by businesses to guarantee that their software applications are reliable even when they receive frequent upgrades from development teams. SRE allows engineers or operations teams to automate the activities that are traditionally performed by operations teams manually to manage production systems and handle issues.

Seamless shopping experiences, along with superior customer service and overall customer satisfaction keep the retail world running and serve as the foundations for business growth. Behind the scenes, IT teams are working on incident response and operational efficiency, which brings things full circle for retail companies.

This is the third and final post (for now) in the series about developing email templates with MJML and deploying them to AWS. In the previous post, we developed a Gulp script to automatically build HTML from the MJML file and insert it in a template file for AWS. In this post, we will set up an automated build and deployment of the email template using Azure DevOps. A quick recap.

Kubernetes is now the de-facto standard for container orchestration. With more and more organizations adopting Kubernetes, it is essential that we get our fundamental ops-infra in place before any migration. In this post, we will learn about leveraging Jenkins and Spinnaker to roll out new versions of your application across different Kubernetes clusters.

This blog dives into detail about one of StackState’s most unique and powerful features, Kubernetes dependency maps. Dependency maps are Kubernetes service and infrastructure maps, enhanced with real-time topology, that show dependencies between all components at any moment in time.

How does Netdata's machine learning (ML) based anomaly detection actually work? Read on to find out!

Container technologies have revolutionized the field of software development. By using containers, you can bundle together an application's source code with its libraries, dependencies, and configurations, ensuring that it runs predictably and reliably on different machines. But how can you be sure that your containers are running smoothly once deployed? That's where container monitoring tools like cAdvisor come in. Below, we'll go over what cAdvisor is and the different use cases for cAdvisor.

Join us for a must-see webinar in which Kubernetes and DevSecOps experts from D2iQ and General Dynamics International Corporation (GDIT) share their insights on how to achieve zero trust security within a Kubernetes environment as part of government modernization. GDIT is among the major system integrators that have chosen D2iQ as the Kubernetes management platform on which they are creating highly secure Kubernetes solutions for their government clients.

Azure Blob Storage is a scalable, cost-effective, and durable cloud storage solution provided by Microsoft Azure. Serving as the backbone for many Azure services, it enables businesses to store a colossal amount of unstructured data ranging from documents, images, backup data, to log files, etc. Azure Blob Storage can handle all your static data that’s stored and read but not changed frequently, making it an indispensable part of any cloud data management strategy.

The age-old dilemma of privacy and security vs. productivity pops up for developers every time they consider introducing a new technology to their stack. The dilemma is often viewed as a trade off: on one hand, privacy and security measures can slow down how quickly new features can be rolled out; on the other hand, prioritizing productivity and business enablement over privacy and security can increase the risk of breaches to an organization.

Everything you need to know about Prometheus Remote Write mechanism and storing metrics in long term storage such as Levitate.

Comparison between Prometheus and Datadog - two of the most popular monitoring tools in the market today.

Progressive delivery is a modification of continuous delivery that allows developers to release new features to users in a gradual, controlled fashion. It does this in two ways. Firstly, by using feature flags to turn specific features ‘on’ or ‘off’ in production, based on certain conditions, such as specific subsets of users. This lets developers deploy rapidly to production and perform testing there before turning a feature on.

In this post, we’re going to learn about the Ansible copy module. Before we look at the copy module specifically, let us first remind ourselves what Ansible is. You can install this open-source software on just one Linux machine. Then it can perform a lot of tasks on connected Linux machines without requiring Ansible installation on them. You can do tasks like copying files, fetching files, and a lot of other things all on connected machines, with a single command.

Authentication is the security process that verifies a user’s identity in order to grant access to their online account. It also functions as the gateway to your product. It’s a workflow you can’t compromise on without risking negative impacts on your users and your company. Fortunately, there are lots of authentication services that can do the heavy lifting for you. It’s important to understand what you can do in case of an authentication failure, when to do it, and why.

Over the past year, Spike.sh social media activity has been null. As a bunch of shy nerds in a small team working remotely across the world, we really never bothered with social media and our presence on it. We always kept our heads low and maneuvered around it. But no more. As of today, we are coming back on social media channels like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Reddit as well.

Azure Blob Storage is a cloud-based storage solution provided by Microsoft as part of its Azure platform. It enables users to store and manage unstructured data such as text, images, videos, and binary data in the cloud. This makes it a highly scalable and cost-effective way to store large amounts of data without having to worry about hardware maintenance or infrastructure management.

In today's fast-paced digital landscape, 24-hour operations centers play a crucial role in managing and monitoring large-scale infrastructures. These centers must be equipped with an effective monitoring solution that addresses their unique needs, enabling them to respond quickly to incidents and maintain optimal system performance. Netdata, a comprehensive monitoring solution, has been designed to meet these critical requirements with its advanced capabilities and recent enhancements.

In this blog post, we will explore the importance of scalability, automation, and AI in the evolving landscape of infrastructure monitoring. We will examine how Netdata's innovative solution aligns with these emerging trends, and how it can empower organizations to effectively manage their modern IT infrastructure.

Recently we updated our infrastructure. We wanted to discuss the updates we have done to show why we think it is important to keep our infrastructure up to date. Updating infrastructure is critical because it provides more security and improved speeds.

Have you ever heard of Azure Blob Storage? If you work with data storage, then chances are you’ve at least heard the name. But what exactly is it? In simple terms, Azure Blob Storage is a cloud-based storage solution provided by Microsoft. It’s used to store and manage unstructured data such as text and binary data, including documents, images, videos, and more.

The public sector is investing heavily on artificial intelligence and machine learning initiatives. Deloitte AI Institute reported that 60% of government AI and data analytics investments aim to directly impact real-time operational decisions and outcomes by 2024. From automating redundant tasks to increasing the quality of services offered to citizens, public sector institutions have a wide range of applications where they could implement AI.

More than 26,000 software vulnerabilities were discovered in 2022 – a new record – and critical vulnerabilities were up 59% over 2021, the previous record-high year. In other words, despite years of DevSecOps, software doesn’t seem to be getting more secure. Release management can help. A crucial goal of release management is vulnerability-free software.

Here’s a crazy question: why do we still require a human to manually declare an incident for the things that we know are incidents? If we have enough confidence to build SLOs and high-severity alert routes for these specific scenarios, why are we still asking a human to confirm it’s an incident and get the assembly process in motion? Isn’t that just another button to push when we could be problem solving instead?

Voice over IP (VoIP) technologies and solutions have been widely adopted by consumers, businesses and service providers since the mid-2000s, but the rising popularity of remote work means businesses of all sizes are even more rapidly turning to VoIP for voice calls.

End-to-end visibility into pipelines is crucial for ensuring the health and performance of your CI system, especially at scale. Within extensive CI systems—which operate under the strain of numerous developers simultaneously pushing commits—even the slightest performance regression or uptick in failure rates can compound rapidly and have tremendous repercussions, causing major cost overruns and impeding release velocity across organizations.

CircleCI supports GitLab as a version control system (VCS). In this tutorial you will learn how to set up your first CircleCI CI/CD pipeline for a project hosted on GitLab. As GitLab can be used either as a SaaS tool, as well as self-managed on-premise installation, I will cover the steps to connect it with CircleCI for both.

Correlation in monitoring and observability refers to the process of analyzing different types of data to identify and understand relationships between application, network, and infrastructure behavior. Correlating these data sets can help IT teams identify all technology components contributing to or impacted by a performance or reliability issue, thereby empowering them to identify root cause and troubleshoot faster.

In 2023, monitoring is essential to modern DevOps teams' work. DevOps teams need reliable and flexible tools to effectively monitor and manage complex systems that can provide real-time insights into system performance, availability, and security. Open-source monitoring tools have become increasingly popular due to their cost-effectiveness, flexibility, and community support.

Squid proxies are among the most popular open-source proxy servers preferred by companies across the globe to keep their networks safe and boost performance. Since Squid proxy’s release in 1996, companies have preferred it for its high-performance proxying, forwarding, and caching functions. Squid proxy logs contain information about the HTTP traffic passing through a server. This includes the source IP, destination IP, time of the request, and accessed URL.

Azure Service Principals are a crucial aspect of managing your Azure resources. They provide a secure and efficient way to manage your resources, without the need for human intervention. In this article, we will explore what Azure Service Principals are, how they work, and why they are important. As you may already know, Azure is a cloud computing platform that allows you to host, deploy and manage your applications and services.

Kubernetes is essential to modern application development and runtime. As a powerful container orchestration platform, its benefits include improved scalability, portability, and automation, all of which contribute to more resilient applications and cost savings. More and more organizations are adopting Kubernetes to develop applications that can scale, recover from failures, and quickly adapt to changing business requirements.

OpenStack is no doubt a wonderful and successful piece of software. It allows you to create your own cloud infrastructure, and thanks to its open-source nature, it’s free to use for everyone. But as with many giant software projects, all that power comes with a challenge: it is reasonably complex to install and configure.

The Docker project was initiated by dotCloud, a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) company that created Docker to run their internal infrastructure. Slowly, Docker became more successful than any of their other products, so dotCloud rebranded as Docker Inc. Docker provides easy-to-use tooling and grew into an entire ecosystem for container management.

While cloud native architecture offers many benefits when it comes to application modernization, some challenges remain for customers. However, VMware Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations on Dell VxRail can improve application resiliency and the performance needed to quickly and securely build, deploy, and manage your multi-cloud environment.

DevOps teams and site reliability engineers (SREs) contend with a never-ending flood of notifications and alerts about outages, potential threats, and other incidents. Companies rely on their DevOps teams to not only keep abreast of all the notifications but also to identify and prioritize the critical alerts and resolve problems in a timely manner. Yet in 2021, International Data Corporation (IDC) reported that companies with 500-1,499 employees ignored or failed to investigate 27% of all alerts.

Preparing for a software audit can be a time-consuming and painful process where a lot of information needs to be gathered and verified in a provable audit trail. It means tracking down and piecing together evidence for pull requests, test reports, security scans, deployment logs, and more. This information is usually scattered across tools which are typically unsecured and unmanaged, so it can be easily deleted and/or modified.

The way to solve Kubernetes complexity is with tools. Ironically, this also creates a lot of complexity because there are many options for each type of tool and, thus, an unfathomable number of combinations. Each stack of tools first requires unique integrations, and then there's ongoing work to keep all those tools integrated and working together. It's no wonder, then, that we've seen a strong willingness for organizations to spend money on Kubernetes tools.

Are you tired of sluggish load times when uploading or downloading large files? Do you need a reliable and scalable storage solution for your business or personal use? Look no further than Premium Block Blob Accounts! In this article, we’ll explore what these accounts are and why they’re essential for anyone dealing with large amounts of data.

Thanks to the economic downturn and rising interest rates, leading financial industry stalwarts such as Accenture, BlackRock, BNY Mellon, Goldman Sachs, and PayPal have already laid off hundreds or thousands of employees. And these are just the big names; banks, credit unions, insurers, and private equity firms of all sizes worldwide are carefully reviewing their headcount and trimming their workforce in order to stay competitive.