Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Marc Andreessen famously said, “Software is eating the world.” Dr. Steve Willmott subsequently retorted, “APIs are eating software.” This is because API based architectures are enabling companies to get away from monolithic architectures and move to microservices. Innovative, disruptive companies like Netflix, Airbnb, Uber, Square, and Slack all build their infrastructure and technology using APIs.

Usually, organizations use an internal network to prevent unauthorized people from connecting to their private network. By using their own network infrastructure and connectivity, they can maintain their desirable level of security for their data. But it would be convenient for users to connect to that private network while they are away from the office through their own internet connection.

Managing dependencies is a fact of life in modern software development. But at Cloudsmith, we’re focused on ensuring that the process is as painless as possible. To that end, we’re delighted to announce both upstream proxying and caching for Maven packages. Together they mean simpler, more reliable integration of third party packages into the development process. Better software, faster.

In the first article, we talked about CI or Continuous Integration. This post looks at the second half of the CI/CD acronym, Continuous Delivery. Continuous delivery takes the build originating in the CI process and puts it into an acceptance environment for further evaluation before promoting the code to production (the released version). To back up a moment, CI is the planning, coding, testing, and building of software in a rapidly repeating process.

Last month, our team published a blog post titled How we reduced the AWS costs of our streaming data pipeline by 67%, which went viral on HackerNews (Top 5). Clearly, developers are hungry to learn about new AWS cost-saving strategies. We’ve had a lot of questions about AWS cost optimization stemming from the original post. However, this question from Carl at Klarna inspired us to write another post. So without further delay, here’s how we approached the problem and made the switch.

Editor's note: This change to the GPG signing key affects both Puppet Enterprise users and open source Puppet users. If you're using Puppet Enterprise, you'll be getting the new key in an upcoming release, or if you manually update your version of puppet-agent, you'll get it then. Thanks to Morgan Rhodes (@KnittyNerd) for all the technical details for this blog post.

As cloud environments grow and evolve more rapidly than ever, and with new cloud services emerging every day, achieving and maintaining a high level of organization across hundreds of resources and global teams can seem like a daunting task. However, it’s not impossible, and can be done through tagging. This post will cover the fundamentals of tags, as well as a comprehensive roadmap to developing a tagging strategy.

While searching for your next GNU/Linux enabled computer, you may have found that some vendors such as Dell, HP and Lenovo sell a selection of desktops and laptops with Ubuntu pre-installed. In fact, Ubuntu is certified on an ever-growing list of hardware. But what does it mean exactly for such a device to be “Ubuntu certified”, and how does this happen? Let’s find out.

To understand what’s going on in their environment, DevOps teams usually ship some combination of logs, metrics and traces—depending on which signals they’re hoping to monitor. Each data type will expose different information about what is happening in a system. However, not all of that information will be helpful on a day-to-day basis, which can rack up unnecessary data storage costs. That should require users start to filter telemetry data across their observability stacks.