Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The Oil and Gas sector, responsible in part for two industrial revolutions in the last 300 years, has been something of a laggard when it comes to adoption of new technologies. Cloud and edge penetration in Oil and Gas is late compared to other industries, mainly due to long standing concerns around security and data privacy.

In August, a ransomware attack hit another company. Unfortunately, it hit a regional cloud provider in Europe this time, and we can call this a “critical hit.” So far, we know a virtual server got compromised and used as a jump host; from there, the attacker started to encrypt all volumes in the same domain. Based on pure luck or some profound reconnaissance, the same server migrated into a different data center and continued its unplanned job from there.

It’s been another busy few months here at Gremlin. Overall, our team has been working on feature improvements to enable teams to measurably improve the reliability of their systems, whether that’s through broadening platform support so you can run Gremlin in more places, making it easier than ever to identify reliability risks, or improving reporting so you can manage reliability programs effectively at enterprise scale. Here’s a summary of what’s new.

The ability to manage IP addresses within a network is crucial for effective network management, especially as networks become more complex and have to manage more demanding loads. Assigning hundreds or even thousands of IP addresses to devices that may be highly distributed or disparate is no simple task. Once devices leave the network, those IP addresses may need to be deleted, plus there’s always the risk of IP address conflict.

Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD), the ability to adapt swiftly to fluctuating workloads is paramount. Kubernetes, with its dynamic orchestration capabilities, offers an invaluable toolset for achieving seamless scalability. This article explores the concept of Kubernetes autoscaling and its pivotal role in optimising CI/CD pipelines.

We at Qovery are excited to offer our Preview Environments for free to all open-source projects. A Preview Environment is like a sandbox where developers can see how changes to the code will work before these changes are final. This is great for projects where many parts, like the backend, frontend, and databases, must talk to each other.

Azure File Share is a cutting-edge service offered by Microsoft’s Azure platform. This robust solution allows seamless integration of serverless file sharing capabilities accessible through industry-leading protocols such as SMB, NFS, and Azure Files REST API. When effectively utilized, Azure File Share can drastically improve the file-sharing experience for cloud-based and on-premises deployments. In the realm of Dynamics 365 Business Central SaaS, it has demonstrated unparalleled benefits.

Blue-green deployments have emerged as a beacon for seamless updates in software development. By juggling two environments, blue (old) and green (new), changes are tested and rolled out with minimal hiccups. Yet, traditional environments, with their database schemas and code differences, often throw a spanner in the works.

The ability to measure the internal states of a system by examining its outputs is called Observability. A system becomes 'observable' when it is possible to estimate the current state using only information from outputs, namely sensor data. You can use the data from Observability to identify and troubleshoot problems, optimize performance, and improve security. In the next few sections, we'll take a closer look at the three pillars of Observability: Metrics, Logs, and Traces.

This month, we’re focused on sharing a more comprehensive picture of our reliability and availability. We experienced 6 extended incidents, 2 of which were due to an upstream third party. While we always want to be transparent with our performance against our stated goals, it’s crucial to note that, while they lasted 60 minutes or longer, the impact of these August incidents on our business operations was relatively minimal.