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

DevOps 101: Introduction To Containers

Containers have become integral to every phase in the lifecycle of application development. Production grade orchestration tools such as Kubernetes have been built to manage them and container platforms like Docker are becoming commonplace in both testing and development. Web tutorials on how to build and manage simple Docker images abound! But what are containers exactly and why have they become so essential to the DevOps ecosystem?

What is Google Cloud Operations?

Formerly known as Stackdriver, Google Cloud Operations Suite is a platform where you can monitor, troubleshoot, and improve application performance on your Google Cloud environment. In this episode of Google Cloud Drawing Board, we show you what Google Cloud Operations Suite is and how you can use it to gain greater observability over your applications.

Deployment Pipeline Launch

Deploying a stack into AWS is at the core of what Stackery helps you do. So much so that Stackery users deployed over 10,000 times last month! For the most part, this has been a manually executed process in our Web UI or command-line client. As teams grow and take on more work, fast and consistent deployments are key to scaling effectively. That’s why we’ve been working this year on continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) features, tailor-built for serverless applications.

How to make snaps and configuration management tools work together

In environments with large numbers of client machines, configuration management tools are often used to simplify and standardize the target state of each host in a seamless, automated and consistent manner. Software like CFEngine, Chef, Ansible, and others offer a high degree of granular control over software packaging and system configurations.

AWS ECU vs vCPU-Everything You Need to Know

If you’ve deployed an application or service to the Amazon Web Service (AWS) cloud, you’ve probably made use of an EC2 instance. One of the decisions that you had to make before you could start a new instance, was which instance type to use. Choosing an EC2 instance type can be a complicated process. AWS organizes their instance types into instance families, and within an instance family, there are varying sizes from micro to 32xlarge.

Detecting Bottlenecks in Virtual Machine Performance

No matter the application or strengths of your Virtual Machine, it must rely on the resources you provide. In such a scenario, it is common to run into bottlenecks and performance issues that can undermine your operations’ productivity. Often, these bottlenecks present challenges to the team as frequent issues pose risks to the operation’s health.

Monitoring CI/CD Pipelines

Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) form the backbone of the product delivery lifecycle. A well tuned, fault tolerant and scalable CI/CD pipeline is very important to support modern Agile teams. Despite obvious business advantages, a rapid release approach combined with continuous change processes resulting from DevOps principles will in the long run generate new challenges. The entire process needs to be carefully examined and controlled.

The Top Azure blogs we follow

As Microsoft is forever releasing new functionality within Azure and all its offerings its often hard to keep abreast of the latest changes in technology. To do so, we here at SmiKar Software often follow influential and knowledgeable people that are experts in the their fields, to keep up to date ourselves. In no particular order, here are some of the noteworthy Azure Blogs that we follow.