Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Kubernetes is built for containers, and it’s been doing that since it used to run docker as an engine for its containers. But what if you want to add VMs to the mix? After all, containers are ephemeral and don’t require fixed IPs as they shift the identity toward labels, but VMs on the other hand are tied to IP addresses and in some cases MAC addresses. This brings us to this blog about VM migration and IP preservation.

The old deployment flow expected a lot from you. You had to know what format your certificate needed to be in. You had to know where it should be stored on the target system. Then you had to review and customize a deployment script in a code editor before anything ran. It turns out most of you don’t want to do that. And fair enough, staring at a script editor when you just want a certificate on your Exchange server is a little intimidating.

Once a year, the Icinga team goes for a team event somewhere about an hour or two away from the office. This year’s edition landed us at the Adventure Campus in Treuchtlichen, right in the middle of this year’s first heatwave. The heat was unbearable. At one point we gave up on the room we had been using and moved everyone down into a basement meeting room instead. It was quite a bit more retro in style, with an overhead projector, that we had a lot of fun with.

Merge conflicts rarely make it into a sprint retrospective, but they should. They’re one of the most reliable ways to lose an hour of flow without anyone noticing it’s gone. Every developer expects them eventually, but almost nobody questions the workflow around resolving them.

The Internet at one of your school sites slows to a crawl. Teachers can't load their lesson plans. A video call for a virtual class freezes. Your IT team calls the ISP. The ISP runs its own checks and tells you everything looks fine on their end. Sound familiar? This is the core problem every school board and public institution runs into eventually. Your ISP has full visibility into their own network. You don't.

A virtual agent answers only what it has been given to work with. When an employee asks about a VPN error, a software license request, or a password reset process that changed last quarter, the agent's response is only as good as the knowledge base behind it. Gaps in that knowledge base show up as deflected tickets that bounce back to a human, generic responses that miss the specific issue, or silence on topics employees ask about every week.