Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

While creating a Docker image, one of the most important decisions to make is what base image to use. In this post I’ll compare three kinds of base images for you.

“With sustainability our primary focus, our technology strategy has to mirror our overall approach. With Rancher we’re driving real transformation to prime us for long-term growth.” – Zach Dunn, Senior Director of Platform Operations and CSO, Optoro. Have you ever considered what happens to items you return to etailers? In retail, especially ecommerce, nearly 25 percent of all goods are returned or don’t sell.

Kubernetes adoption comes with a lot of challenges. One of them is consistently deploying applications to the platform. GitOps is a strategy which solves this problem and solves it at scale. In this blog, we will share how to leverage TravisCI and ArgoCD to design a highly scalable production-ready CI/CD workflow.

Cloud-native is the new standard for modern applications. This usually means container-based applications, using the popular Docker and Kubernetes platforms, and increasingly also service mesh platforms such as Istio and Envoy. With that, container security in general—and Kubernetes security in particular—is at the forefront of engineers’ minds. Docker popularized containers based on the good-old but little-used LXC Linux containers.

Editor's note: This blog is part two of our series on launching an app to AWS. For the first installment, "How to deploy an app to AWS: Getting started," click here. So, your application is ready for production. You’ve taken an inventory of your applications, dependencies, and configuration. Now, you’re ready to create a new AWS account and start launching resources.

If you’re in enterprise IT, you’ve probably already looked into Microsoft’s Azure public cloud. Microsoft Azure offers excellent enterprise-grade features and tightly integrates with Office 365 and Active Directory. It also provides a managed Kubernetes service, AKS, that you can provision from the Azure portal.

In this blog post, we’re going to explain how to monitor Open Policy Agent (OPA) Gatekeeper with Prometheus metrics. If you have deployed OPA Gatekeeper, monitoring this admission controller is as relevant as monitoring the rest of the Kubernetes control plane components, like APIserver, kubelet or controller-manager. If something breaks here, Kubernetes won’t deploy new pods in your cluster; and if it’s slow, your cluster scale performance will degrade.