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The latest News and Information on DevOps, CI/CD, Automation and related technologies.

The State of Robotics - March 2021

It’s never too late to learn. As any reinforcement learning agent, we get rewarded by the new knowledge that we acquire. Likewise, we learn by doing, by rolling up our sleeves and getting to work. (Do you want a hands-on book on Reinforcement Learning? Here is my personal favourite) March has shown us great examples of this. From robots learning to encourage social participation to detect serious environmental problems, it was a learning month.

Visualizing your CloudFormation Template with Stackery

Stackery can be used to create a new CloudFormation template or to quickly visualize an existing one. Code is automatically generated as you simply drag-and-drop resources on a graphical grid. The experience is much more intuitive than previous generation tools like AWS CloudFormation Designer. Stackery visualizes resources the way a human would perceive them, grouping related resources together.

HAProxy Forwards Over 2 Million HTTP Requests per Second on a Single Arm-based AWS Graviton2 Instance

For the first time, a software load balancer exceeds 2-million RPS on a single Arm instance. A few weeks ago, while I was working on an HAProxy issue related to thread locking contention, I found myself running some tests on a server with an 8-core, 16-thread Intel Xeon W2145 processor that we have in our lab. Although my intention wasn’t to benchmark the proxy, I observed HAProxy reach 1.03 million HTTP requests per second.

Top Observability Strategies for Distributed Systems

In a distributed IT environment, there are a lot of moving parts, and all of them need to be monitored to ensure everything is working as it should. The rise of more complex infrastructures interweaving the cloud, on-premises, and hybrid architectures makes this a challenge. To make sure you have adequate visibility, you need an IT observability strategy.

Just call us "Major Incident Software Innovation of the Year"

We won an award! We're excited to share that we were named the Major Incident Software Innovation of the Year 2020 at the MIM Awards. Our CEO, Robert Ross (better known as Bobby), accepted over video on our behalf (watch the video below). A lot happened for us in 2020 -- not only from winning new business, but growing as a team, and maturing our product. We're excited that MIM felt the same way about us and we're honoured to recieve this award!

Kubernetes 1.21 available from Canonical

Today, Canonical announces full enterprise support for Kubernetes 1.21, from cloud to edge. Canonical Kubernetes support covers MicroK8s, Charmed Kubernetes and kubeadm. Starting with 1.21, moving forward Canonical commits to supporting N-2 releases as well as providing extended security maintenance (ESM) and patching for N-4 releases in the stable release channel.

Visualizing CloudFormation templates

As your infrastructure grows, getting a handle on all your AWS resources can be overwhelming. While that’s probably an understatement, help could be right around the corner. We’ll cover a few CloudFormation visualizer tools that can help, but let’s level set first. AWS CloudFormation is an established Infrastructure-as-Code solution that allows you to define, provision, organize, manage and update your AWS resources from a text-file template.