Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

It's 2022 and time to predict a few things for the coming year in the cloud native ecosystem.

Adopting a container-first approach represents an unrivalled opportunity for financial institutions to increase system efficiency and resource utilisation, improve security, introduce automation, and accelerate innovation. Containers offer a logical packaging tool in which applications can be decoupled from the underlying infrastructure on which they run.

Companies that want to take care of their customers have to invest in a Customer Success team and define the right strategy (Thanks Rav Dhaliwal for your help here). Thinking about customer success is typically something that happens much later (too late?) after the Sales efforts. Growth pressure on startups puts effort in the sales machine to close as many customers as possible while forgetting that growth comes from the current customers. A happy customer is less likely to churn.

The container orchestration service Kubernetes has taken cloud-native application hosting by storm. By automating infrastructure tasks, Kubernetes—an open-source system designed by Google—simplifies the technical work of application deployment, scaling, and management. Managed Kubernetes services take this process a step further, handling more of the management tasks so that engineers can focus more time and resources on developing apps.

Does this combination of words sound somewhat new to you as well? It may be just me, but having the opportunity to work on both sides, software development and system administration, the combination above seemed somewhat new or different to me. I always saw Oracle as something that would be managed and owned by the System Administrators. Technologies such as the database, ERPs, finance systems, and more which would take quite a lot of effort and cost to implement and maintain.

Windows applications constitute a large portion of the services and applications that run in many organizations. When moving to a Kubernetes-based architecture, there is a need to support these as well. Up until April 2020, the lack of container support within the Windows operating system left Linux container images as the only viable option for Kubernetes container deployment.

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