Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As a software engineer, leveraging GitHub is one of those tools that transcend your personal and professional development activities. Bringing open source to the masses, GitHub is a familiar platform for many. A newer addition to the GitHub Platform is GitHub Actions which was originally a workflow engine, now expanding into CI/CD.

Kubernetes has become a fixture in production for most IT Operations teams. The VMware “State of Kubernetes 2021 Report” shows a distinct shift towards a reliance on Kubernetes, with almost two thirds of respondents now saying they use it in production. Companies with over 500 developers are driving this adoption, with 78% reporting that they run mostly- or all-containerized workloads in production.

The process of monitoring servers and applications has undergone many transformations throughout the years. When it began, the main question was whether the server was up or down. Now, monitoring helps answer questions about the internal state of an application and infer its status (also called white box monitoring). Monitoring today's complex infrastructure systems can be just as much an art as a technical skill.

More than anything else, Kubernetes troubleshooting relies on the ability to quickly contextualize the problem with what’s happening in the rest of the cluster. As complicated as this may sound, SPEED is really the name of the game. After all, more often than not, you will be conducting your investigation under the glow of fires burning bright in production. Getting relevant context quickly and seeing things holistically is exactly what Komodor was created for.

The lockc project provides mandatory access controls (MAC) for container workloads. Its goal is to improve the current state of container/host isolation. The lockc team believes that container engines and runtimes do not provide enough isolation from the host, which I describe later in the “Why do we need it?” Section. In this blog post, I’ll provide an introduction to lockc, discuss why you need it and show you how to try it out for yourself.

It's 2022 and time to predict a few things for the coming year in the cloud native ecosystem.

Adopting a container-first approach represents an unrivalled opportunity for financial institutions to increase system efficiency and resource utilisation, improve security, introduce automation, and accelerate innovation. Containers offer a logical packaging tool in which applications can be decoupled from the underlying infrastructure on which they run.

Companies that want to take care of their customers have to invest in a Customer Success team and define the right strategy (Thanks Rav Dhaliwal for your help here). Thinking about customer success is typically something that happens much later (too late?) after the Sales efforts. Growth pressure on startups puts effort in the sales machine to close as many customers as possible while forgetting that growth comes from the current customers. A happy customer is less likely to churn.

The container orchestration service Kubernetes has taken cloud-native application hosting by storm. By automating infrastructure tasks, Kubernetes—an open-source system designed by Google—simplifies the technical work of application deployment, scaling, and management. Managed Kubernetes services take this process a step further, handling more of the management tasks so that engineers can focus more time and resources on developing apps.