Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Infrastructure management has come a long way. (Mostly) gone are the days of manual configurations and deployments, when using SSH in a “for” loop was a perfectly reasonable way to execute server changes. Automation is a way of life. Configuration management tools like Chef, Puppet, and Ansible — once on the bleeding edge — are now used by most enterprises.

Have you ever found yourself trying to reconstruct an event from the past only to come up blank because you cannot go so far back in time? If only you could bring back that missing piece of the puzzle! In the world of IT, logs are the way machines and software record events. They help us understand when an event happened, where they happened and most importantly, why they happened.

Today we are announcing the support for Windows containers with Kubernetes 1.14 in Preview mode. As many users may know, Rancher 2.1.0 supported Windows containers in experimental mode. Now that SIG Windows and Microsoft have announced the general availability of containers in Windows Server 2019 with Kubernetes 1.14, we have upgraded Rancher to both support the latest version of Windows containers (and Kubernetes) and after the preview is over, make it generally available.

Amazon ECS allows you to run Docker containers your application without having to actually manage physical hardware (or virtual hardware, in the case of the Fargate launch type). However, since it’s a managed service, you have less visibility with traditional monitoring tools. As such, it becomes even more important to take advantage of the available monitoring tools in AWS. In this post, we’ll explain how to use CloudWatch to monitor ECS and what is important to watch.

Following the recent announcement of our partnership with Microsoft, Azure users can now monitor, troubleshoot, and secure their environments with a fully managed Azure-native ELK solution. However, If you want to set up the ELK Stack on Azure on your own this guide will help you get started.

A Rails migration is a tool for changing an application’s database schema. Instead of managing SQL scripts, you define database changes in a domain-specific language (DSL). The code is database-independent, so you can easily move your app to a new platform. You can roll migrations back, and manage them alongside your application source code.

Cloud computing, containerization, and container orchestration are the most important trends in DevOps. Whether you’re a data scientist, software developer, or product manager, it’s good to know Docker and Kubernetes basics. Both technologies help you collaborate with others, deploy your projects, and increase your value to employers. In this article, we’ll cover essential Kubernetes concepts. There are a lot of Kubernetes terms, which can make it intimidating.