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DevOps Insights with Dennis: Efficient DevOps - GitLab CI/CD for Docker Builds and ArgoCD Deployments on Kubernetes.

If you’re using Grafana and Kubernetes, we’ve got exciting news — Grafana Labs will be maintaining and managing the Grafana Operator, the open source Kubernetes operator that helps you manage your Grafana instances within and outside of Kubernetes. This significant move not only elevates the Grafana Operator to an officially supported tool but also cements its place as a staple for managing Grafana as code, especially for users keen on adopting GitOps principles.

Continuous delivery (CD) is an application development practice that involves automatically preparing code changes for release to a production environment. Combined with continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery is a key aspect of modern software development. Together, these two practices are known as CI/CD. Properly implemented CI enables developers to deploy any code change to testing and production environments late in the software development lifecycle (SDLC).

Platform Engineering is a hot topic these days. We’ve seen the hype around it in 2023, and I expect we shall see it becoming production-grade as we move into 2024. I wanted to look into this topic, and learn from those who’ve already implemented it at scale: the e-commerce hyperscaler Shopify. In the latest episode of OpenObservability Talks, I had the pleasure of hosting Aparna Subramanian, the Director of Production Engineering at Shopify.

We’re excited to announce that with the release of Grafana Beyla 1.2, Kubernetes support is now fully integrated. With this update, the Grafana Beyla configuration now “understands” Kubernetes semantics to provide a more fine-grained selection of services to instrument. Beyla users can decorate metrics and traces with the metadata of Kubernetes entities, such as pods and deployments, that run the automatically instrumented services.

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) enables you to easily deploy and manage containerized applications in Azure while leveraging Microsoft resources such as development tools, security features, and more. As with any Kubernetes service, the sheer volume of containers being orchestrated makes monitoring AKS cluster health challenging, which can slow response times to critical incidents and create bottlenecks around long-term optimizations.

We're thrilled to announce the launch of our latest feature: Deployments! This game-changing addition is set to redefine how our users deploy and manage their applications, ensuring zero downtime and enhancing productivity.