Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

I’ve recently co-founded a startup, and after working so long in more mature enterprises with diverse toolchains, it was actually massively educational to return to first steps and figure out what our critical needs were, balanced with essentially zero budget. As we’ve grown and raised money, we’ve graduated in some areas to other tools, but I wanted to share what we felt were the absolute can’t-live-without-tools for a team building SaaS software.

Adopting cloud native technologies like Kubernetes and Helm means your company’s operations can sail swiftly across the globe’s oceans to reach teams and customers. But there are dangers in the deep. With many components in Kubernetes, securing every dimension can be quite challenging and require a bit of learning curve. Let’s identify some important best practices that can help you to steer straight.

I was speaking with a VP of Engineering friend at last year’s KubeCon about how to pitch Kubernetes to the C-Suite. The benefits for innovation were clear - containerized microservices empowered her small teams to deliver more value, more rapidly. As is often the case with Boardroom discussions, though, the question of cost was always next. Sure, they want you to innovate - as long as it’s within the constraints of a budget! But cost discussions around Kubernetes can be difficult.

Minimizing costs, reducing risk, and maximizing business value—all at the same time—requires a delicate balancing act. It’s not a new challenge, nor is it unique to IT infrastructures. But when it comes to the cloud, especially in hybrid cloud scenarios, it requires you to understand the performance, risk/compliance, and cost impacts of your current resource allocations and then adjust to maintain the optimal decisions to meet your SLA and budget targets.

Today we released updates for a series of vulnerabilities termed ‘There’s a hole in the boot’ / BootHole in GRUB2 (GRand Unified Bootloader version 2) that could allow an attacker to subvert UEFI Secure Boot. The original vulnerability, CVE-2020-10713, which is a high priority vulnerability was alerted to Canonical in April 2020.

The Activate program from Amazon Web Services (AWS) is an easy way to get a little bit of help for your cloud-based startup. Depending on the stage of your startup and some other criteria, you could get up to $100,000 in sweet, sweet AWS credits. So how do you know if you qualify for AWS Activate? Here’s the deal.

Kubernetes is the most popular Open Source technology of the last five years. It was created by Google to allow companies to use container (Docker) applications in production. Today, Kubernetes is the new standard for running applications in the Cloud or on its servers (on-premise). I even heard from a Cloud architect from Azure: "our customers no longer come to us to do Cloud, but to do Kubernetes". That's to say how much a utility software* upsets a whole ecosystem.