Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Are you building and deploying software manually and would like to change that? Are you interested in learning about building a Jenkins pipeline and better understand CI/CD and DevOps at the same time? In this first post, we will go over the fundamentals of how to design pipelines and how to implement them in Jenkins. Automation is the key to eliminating manual tasks and to reducing the number of errors while building, testing and deploying software.

In today’s era of microservices, containers, and containerized applications, software architecture is more complex. Kubernetes is king in this environment, orchestrating an army of Docker containers in more distributed environments.

Longhorn is cloud-native distributed block storage for Kubernetes that is easy to deploy and upgrade, 100 percent open source and persistent. Longhorn’s built-in incremental snapshot and backup features keep volume data safe, while its intuitive UI makes scheduling backups of persistent volumes easy to manage. Using Longhorn, you get maximum granularity and control, and can easily create a disaster recovery volume in another Kubernetes cluster and fail over to it in the event of an emergency.

The first means to collect security-relevant information at Cloud SIEM Enterprise (CSE) was our Network Sensor. It was built to analyze network traffic and provide visibility beyond traditional SIEM's down to the network-level. Beyond organizing packets into flows, the sensor supports more advanced features such as decoding of common protocols, file carving, SSL certificate validation, OS fingerprinting, clustered deployment and more.

When I read Greg Ferro’s infamous “Why I hate ITIL so much” blog back in 2015, I have to admit that I agreed with many (albeit not all) of what he said. Maybe it’s the issues that I have with authority in general, or maybe it’s my many years of working within the constraints of ITIL and ITSM in operating systems and services – but I truly believed (and still do) that well-educated, experience and consensus-based pragmatism is what actually gets things done.

Andreessen Horowitz recently published a blog about the Heavy Cloud Costs and Scaling Challenges of The New Business of AI, in which they describe how AI companies are facing cloud cost challenges, which are impacting their margins. As someone who used to manage a fully home-grown on-site distributed speech recognition platform for an industry leader, I know firsthand that ML can be expensive and challenging to maintain. However, it doesn’t have to be.

Kubernetes 1.18 is about to be released! After the small release that was 1.17, 1.18 comes strong and packed with novelties. Where do we begin? There are new features, like the OIDC discovery for the API server and the increased support for Windows nodes, that will have a big impact on the community. We are also happy to see how some features that have been on Alpha state for too long are now being reconsidered and prepared for the spotlight, like Ingress or the API Server Network Proxy.

The experts from Azure Functions team has yet again joined us for the monthly webcast. Given the unprecedented time, this webcast happened a bit unusual where the folks joined from their home rather from Channel 9 studio and which made this webcast even more unique and exciting. In this session, Jeff Hollan, Eduardo and Alex Karcher have joined to give us the picture of the latest happenings in the Azure Functions space.