Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

This article is based on a true story. The names of the company and people involved were changed to protect the innocent 🙂 . A few weeks ago, we were contacted by a pretty big e-commerce company. We can’t really share their name but, for the purpose of this story, let’s call them “KubeCorp Inc”. They reached out to us following an edge-case incident they had, which resulted in severe downtime.

Recently, we introduced support for default values in custom pipeline variables. Today, we're happy to announce the ability to make pipeline variables configuration more flexible with predefined values. We added a property to predefine values that can be assigned to a variable. It helps avoid errors, and improves the user experience. Instead of typing a variable value, you can choose it from a dropdown.

With progressive delivery, DevOps, scrum, and agile methodologies, the software delivery process has become faster and more collaborative than ever before. Scrum has emerged as a ubiquitous framework for agile collaboration, instilling some basic meetings and roles into a team and enabling them to begin iterating on product increments quickly. However, as scrum teams grow and systems become more complex, it can be difficult to maintain productivity levels in your organization.

The software testing data provided by CI/CD tools is valuable, but it is not always comprehensive enough to give managers the insights they need to make improvements. To make effective business decisions, managers need visibility into the entire testing process, in a way that will help them understand what needs to be done and how.

Over the years, containerization has grown in popularity among organizations and will continue to grow. For example, containerization is slowly becoming the de facto approach when it comes to building applications following the microservices architecture. It is undeniable that containerization has a lot of advantages, but these advantages come at a cost.

Recently, a critical out-of-bounds vulnerability, assigned to CVE-2021-44142, was disclosed in Samba versions prior to 4.13.17. The Samba vulnerability carries a critical CVSS of 9.9 and allows attackers to remotely execute code on machines running a Samba server with a vulnerable configuration. The vulnerability was disclosed as part of the Pwn2Own Austin competition where researchers are challenged to exploit widely-used software and devices with unknown vulnerabilities.

Just like many other production DevOps engineering teams, our JFrog team deploys new version releases several times a day to AWS, Azure and GCP, across more than 20 cloud regions. This process used to take us many hours and could have even failed if it was done alongside maintenance by other teams.

In this article, we’ll deep dive into all the basics to help you decide if AWS RDS is the right decision for your architecture and help you hit the ground running if you do end up AWS RDS. For many decades now, relational databases (RDS) have been the place to store your data. They are pretty flexible often use some kind of SQL dialect, which is one of the main languages taught in computer science classes, and widely understood by the average developer.

Typically, Infrastructure-as-Code or IaCs have had their own languages to learn. For example, if leveraging Terraform most likely you came across Terraform’s native syntax, HCL. Though as software engineers we might be more familiar with other languages of choice. Using a general-purpose computer language vs a provider level syntax does unlock the power of the language; anything you can do in the computer language potentially can be additional methods, calls, etc.