Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Once you’ve hired a software engineer, it’s easy to feel like the recruiting process is over. However, the first few days and weeks of your new engineer’s experience are critical to their long term success and happiness at your startup. In this last part of our series on hiring software engineers as the CTO of a startup, we’ll talk about how we onboard software engineers at Blue Matador and the insights I’ve gained in this part of the CTO experience.

Edge computing has become a clear strategic goal for many enterprises, for some it is already an absolute necessity. As the demands of applications software and the capabilities of hardware continue to grow, containers and Kubernetes have become a compelling technology for edge computing. In just the past 5 years, the way that software is manufactured and maintained has changed dramatically with the introduction of Kubernetes container orchestration.

Kubernetes is THE buzzword these days. Almost every IT organization is currently using it or is in the process of implementing it as part of their infrastructure. The transition to Kubernetes is complicated, whether a company is using an on-premises, cloud, hybrid, or managed solution, and it usually involves other changes in the codebase, such as shifting to a microservices architecture. While the implementation phase is led by the DevOps team, it requires the participation of the whole R&D group.

Kubernetes is one of the most advanced orchestration tools that currently exists in the software world. It provides out-of-the-box automation for environment maintenance and simplifies deployment and upgrade processes. It has different implementation types (on-premise, cloud-managed, hybrid, and more), multiple open-source supporting tools, and supports a wide range of configuration options.

Kubernetes has several key differences that push the limits of traditional application monitoring. Due to the distributed ephemeral nature of Kubernetes, most existing solutions fail to give the visibility we might expect, resulting in longer resolution times. Looking at these potential pitfalls can help guide us as we take a fresh look at Kubernetes management and monitoring.

When you find a software engineer who passes your code test, you’ll want to bring them in for an in-office interview. In this part of our series on hiring software engineers as the CTO of a startup, we’ll talk about Blue Matador’s approach to the in-office interview and the insights I’ve gained in this part of the CTO experience.

Kubernetes, commonly called K8s, is an open-source container management system developed by Google. Containers and tools like Kubernetes enable automation of many aspects of application deployment, which provides tremendous benefits to businesses. K8s is just as vulnerable to attacks and cybercrime as traditional environments, in both public and private clouds. In this blog post, we’ve compiled everything you need to know to make sure your Kubernetes environment is safe.

IBM Cloud has made a massive shift to Kubernetes. From an initial plan for a hosted Kubernetes public cloud offering it has snowballed to tens of thousands of production Kubernetes clusters running across more than 60 data centers around the globe, hosting 90% of the PaaS and SaaS services offered by IBM Cloud. I spoke with Dan Berg, IBM Distinguished Engineer, to find out more about their journey, what triggered such a significant shift, and what they learned along the way.