Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Don’t let the title mislead you, we love DevOps here at Cycle. Without proper DevOps processes, building and scaling cloud-based applications can become a nightmare for maintainability. A proper DevOps plan brings together an organization’s developers, QA support, and operations teams to pursue the goal of delivering software more predictably. An admirable goal for any team and something that can be immensely helpful for even small teams to become more efficient.

If you are a developer who uses containers, chances are you and your team have heard about Kubernetes. At its core, Kubernetes is a container operating system for the web, but has grown to be much more. Sure, Kubernetes can manage your containers, network traffic, and bring up a crashed ad, but it has also become a widely adopted platform with a growing community.

To complement distributed tracing, runtime metrics, log analytics, synthetic testing, and real user monitoring, we’ve made another addition to the application developer’s toolkit to make troubleshooting performance issues even faster and simpler. Today, we’re excited to introduce Profiling—an always-on, production profiler that enables you to continuously analyze code-level performance across your entire environment, with minimal overhead.

Security is one of the most talked-about topics for Kubernetes users. Google “Kubernetes security” and you’ll find a huge number of articles, blogs and more. The reason is simple: you need to align your container and Kubernetes security with your organization’s existing security profile. Kubernetes has some strong security best practices for your cluster—authentication and authorization, encryption in secrets and objects in the etcd database—to name a few.

Arild Jensen, SRE Manager at Upwork, talks about his journey into SRE and some best practices he picked up along the way including implementing a blameless culture, code review and making decisions based on hard data.

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) is a fully managed service that allows developers to build highly available and scalable applications on Kafka. In addition to enabling developers to migrate their existing Kafka applications to AWS, Amazon MSK handles the provisioning and maintenance of Kafka and ZooKeeper nodes and automatically replicates data across multiple availability zones for high availability.

In Part 1 we’ve described what container monitoring is and why you need it. Because each container typically runs a single process, has its own environment, utilizes virtual networks, or has various methods of managing storage. Traditional monitoring solutions take metrics from each server and the applications they run. These servers and applications running on them are typically very static, with very long uptimes.

Even though containers have been around for ages, it wasn’t until Docker showed up that containers really became widely adopted. Docker has made it easier, faster, and cheaper to deploy containerized applications. However, organizations that adopt container orchestration tools for application deployment face new maintenance challenges.

AWS (Amazon Web Services) is an amazing and reliable cloud service provider. AWS, like Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure, provides everything you need to host an application without having to worry about running the underlying servers and network configuration. Everything you need to quickly begin hosting is provided as a packaged services.

Because monitoring requires some degree of access to your applications, it’s important that you take certain steps to ensure the right amount of access without compromising your app’s security. In this first in a series of posts, we’ll go over some high-level best practices to securing Sensu, followed by a webinar later this month which will offer a deeper dive into setting up certificates.