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.

As cloud use has increased, so have the costs associated with it. In 2020, surveyed organizations reported being over budget for their cloud spend by an average of 23%. Most are spending more than they expected, and to top it off — they don’t feel they’re getting value from that spend.

The future of financial services technology infrastructure is hybrid multi-cloud. Hybrid multi-cloud architecture provides financial institutions flexibility, portability, interoperability, and the control needed to consistently deploy and manage enterprise applications and workloads. By adopting hybrid cloud, finservs realise the benefits of effective cloud cost management, security, compliance, efficiency and agility. The hybrid cloud strategy starts with choosing the right enterprise Linux.

Cooling systems are one of the most important components of a data center. They often consume about half of all the data center’s total energy and are necessary to maintain a safe operating environment. The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) thermal guidelines recommend that the ideal temperature for server inlets is between 64.4° F and 80.6° F with a relative humidity between 40% and 60%.