Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Every public cloud provider has a templating mechanism to deploy fully configured applications. For anyone interested in a vendor-neutral approach that works on major public clouds, cloud-init offers a good solution. Cloud-init makes your work re-usable regardless of the clouds you deploy to. It’s an open source configuration automation solution for Linux, which performs steps at various stages of a single machine’s boot up.

We kicked off the start of the Day 2 with our host Nigel Poulton as he prepared us with a quick rundown of the highlights from the first day before giving attendees a taste of what to expect from the rest of the event. After this point, Nigel brought Kelsey Hightower to the stage for his keynote session with Mark Boost and Dinesh Majrekar. If you missed our Day 1 recap, check it out here.

The need to monitor the health of servers and networks is unanimous. You don't want to be a blind pilot who is headed for an inevitable disaster. Fortunately, there are many open source and commercial tools to help you do the monitoring. As always, good and expensive are not as attractive as good and cheap. So, we've put together the most valuable cloud and windows monitoring tools to get you started.

Cloud computing has become the default way for deploying applications or services. Cloud computing offers companies, enterprises and startups the ability to avoid, or minimize, spending while leveraging the flexible nature of the cloud infrastructure to meet growing business needs. A growing challenge for applications is obtaining optimal availability at all times.

Want to invest in a virtual private network or SD-WAN tunnel but don’t know which one to use? It’s important to realize these technologies have many differences and serve unique purposes in your business environment. This guide will teach you more and help you make the right purchasing decision for your business.

Developing apps takes a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. It can feel like a marathon that doesn’t even have the courtesy to end once you cross the finish line. From managing infrastructure to scaling, operations, and security (to name just a few things), it takes plenty of work to ensure that your cherished creation is loved by users and customers. App hosting takes much of this responsibility off your shoulders, and a solid Platform as a Service (PaaS) provider can go even further.

A platform as a service, or PaaS, is one of the three major cloud computing service models. In our opinion, it’s the only one that successfully delivers all benefits of the cloud to software developers, including control, cost-effectiveness, flexibility, and scalability. Of course, other as-a-service models are still useful. In fact, all three main cloud computing models offer different advantages to organizations.

Getting your applications running on Kubernetes is one thing: keeping them up and running is another thing entirely. While the goal is to deploy applications that never fail, the reality is that applications often crash, terminate, or restart with little warning. Even before that point, applications can have less visible problems like memory leaks, network latency, and disconnections. To prevent applications from behaving unexpectedly, we need a way of continually monitoring them.