Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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

StackStorm v3.4.0 Released

With version 3.4, StackStorm code itself will only run on Python 3. For the v3.4 release, we have chosen to run on Python 3.6 across all of our supported platforms. For users still on Ubuntu 16.04, you will need to source your own Python 3.6 packages, but we have been using the Python 3.6 Ubuntu PPA without many issues. Looking forward to StackStorm 3.5, we will be removing the ability to install Python 2 packs.

Validating the resilience of your API gateway with Chaos Engineering

Get started with Gremlin's Chaos Engineering tools to safely, securely, and simply inject failure into your systems to find weaknesses before they cause customer-facing issues. API gateways are a critical component of distributed systems and cloud-native deployments. They perform many important functions including request routing, caching, user authentication, rate limiting, and metrics collection. However, this means that any failures in your API gateway can put your entire deployment at risk.

Why we went passwordless on our new product

Passwords are dying. The cost of creating and maintaining passwords is becoming untenable. Which can be seen in the rise of users logging in with social products and developers outsourcing their pain to Auth0 and the likes. We decided to sidestep the password based authentication and went passwordless on our new product. Read on to see how you can go passwordless too.

Deploying Ruby on Rails to Hetzner Cloud with Cloud 66

Ruby on Rails is one of the most popular frameworks for developing web applications. If you're looking for an easy and reliable way to deploy your Rails application to production on Hetzner Cloud with Cloud 66, you're in the right place. Based on your infrastructure requirements you can choose between two Cloud 66 products: you can either natively deploy your Rails app with Cloud 66 for Rails, or deploy a containerized Rails application with Cloud 66 Maestro.

Dependency Confusion Attacks

You must secure your software supply chain. Now, more than ever, it is vital. For a long time, a primary concern in security was malicious actors exploiting inherent weaknesses in software. Privilege escalations, SQL injections, race conditions etc. These are, of course, still a concern and should be afforded the attention that they deserve. But now, there is another worry, one that is arguably even more important – A Supply Chain Attack.

10 Server Maintenance Tips for Efficient Server Maintenance

Just like your commercial vehicles or HVAC systems, servers require regular maintenance to ensure they are operating effectively and optimally. So, we decided to compile a list of server maintenance tips you should be doing. Keep in mind, these server maintenance tips are meant to be used as a guide to help you develop your server maintenance checklist and schedule.

Introducing Incident Timer

We’re excited to announce Incident Timer - a “days without an incident” timer for software teams to keep track of major engineering incidents. As the people behind Spike.sh, we keep discussing how to build a culture of reliability with our customers. We loved the idea of safety/accident timers in factories which kept track of major accidents. It's a simple and elegant way to keep safety on everybody’s minds.

IT Ops tax: Death by a thousand cuts

There are many hidden costs in running sub-optimal IT operations, that most organizations don’t consider. Enterprises often look at service downtime as their only KPI, but that is really only the tip of the iceberg. Without a properly operating incident management lifecycle, enterprises tend to support poorly performing services instead of fixing them.

What is DevOps?

What is DevOps? DevOps is a term for a cluster of concepts that has become a movement, “a cross-disciplinary practice dedicated to the study of building, evolving and operating, rapidly-changing resilient systems at scale.” (Jez Humble) The definition of DevOps is not agreed upon by everyone because of the complex processes attached to the term, however, the benefits to teams are universally agreed upon.

Users Monitoring - Monitor Remote Users and Analyze Efficiency

Something which the digitalization trend did not manage to do, was done by the global pandemic. And this is the global switch to remote work, remote learning and remote collaboration. Many companies and industries were thinking that allowing their staff to work remotely is not possible and will harm more than bring benefits. But when the pandemic started, many organizations needed to make a fast transition to remote work and remote work organization.