Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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

How to apply for AWS Activate

AWS Activate is a program that provides startups with free AWS credits. There are specific requirements startups must meet in order to qualify, and not all startups that qualify end up receiving the free AWS credits. Still, for any startup planning on running their app in AWS, it’s probably worth a try. AWS Activate has two packages: the Founders package and the Portfolio package.

KMC - Automated Optimization of Kubernetes Performance

Using the Rancher platform and services, enterprise IT and DevOps teams can overcome the complexity of standing up and running multiple Kubernetes containers. However, as deployments scale, and the number of apps and workloads that teams have running on Kubernetes multiplies, complexity grows exponentially. Much of the difficulty centers on trying to find the best configuration settings for applications. Manual, trial-and-error approaches are ineffective, and always overprovisioning isn’t a viable strategy.

Ansible StackStorm role v2.0.0 released

We’re very excited to announce that Ansible roles to deploy StackStorm have been promoted to new major version 2.0.0! There has been a lot of activity recently on the ansible-st2 repository, with 4 releases in the last couple of months. Ansible can now be used to deploy StackStorm on more modern operating systems and with newer third-party applications.

Exporters and Target Labels

When monitoring third-party applications with Prometheus, you’ll need an exporter if the application doesn’t already expose metrics in the appropriate format. How do you find an appropriate exporter, and once you have your exporters, how should you organize your label taxonomies to reflect your infrastructure? Many applications in the systems you’re in charge of will be third-party applications, which do not natively expose Prometheus-formatted metrics.

Introducing Versions API to Automate Error Response for New Code Versions

You know the feeling. You’ve just deployed a new version to production and are monitoring the Rollbar dashboard for any new errors or looking out for any Slack notifications. You’re keeping an eye on the number of new or reactivated errors, their severity level, and triaging to see which errors need to be assigned and to whom. Now what if you could automate these tasks?

Nishant Singh shares his thoughts on being an SRE

Nishant Singh is an SRE at LinkedIn based in Bangalore. Currently, he is working towards building and maintaining applications that improve the overall MTTD (Mean time to detect) and MTTR (Mean time to recover) of the site. He likes to build services and play with the latest technologies. Before LinkedIn, Nishant worked for a few companies in the security and e-commerce domain as a DevOps engineer where he was primarily responsible for building infrastructure, deployment pipelines and security.

The Cloud - A sellers' perspective on a hot topic.

I have worked at Virtana for nearly 9 years. During that time, I have had the pleasure to interact with customers, prospects, and partners around the world. The types of conversations I have participated in have dramatically shifted during that time. Back in September 2011, the dialogues were largely focused on Storage Area Network (SAN) infrastructure, and how Virtana could provide performance assurances targeted at this environment. Over time, the conversations have broadened dramatically.

Best Practices for Onboarding JFrog Xray

Introducing, adding, or replacing a new SCA (Software Composition Analysis) tool such as JFrog Xray into your SDLC, if not handled correctly, can be very disruptive to the SDLC and organization. This blog post provides recommended best practices for onboarding JFrog Xray; in order to reduce disruption, improve adoption, and shift left to create a DevSecOps behaviour.

Automatic Merging When Builds Pass

Today Bitbucket is releasing a new labs feature, "Pending Merges", which allows for automatic merging of pull requests when builds pass. This means no more continually checking back in on your pull request, just waiting and waiting for your builds to pass before you can finally merge it. You will no longer be forced to begrudgingly fix that one-character whitespace typo in your comment that you really should fix, but that means you're in for another 30-60 minutes of watching your builds.

Monitor and Optimize Your Rancher Environment with Datadog

Many organizations use Kubernetes to quickly ship new features and improve the reliability of their services. Rancher enables teams to reduce the operational overhead of managing their cloud-native workloads — but getting continuous visibility into these environments can be challenging. In this post, we’ll explore how you can quickly start monitoring orchestrated workloads with Rancher’s built-in support for Prometheus and Grafana.