Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Outsourcing OpenStack operations can significantly accelerate the OpenStack deployment process. Although most organisations are successful with the initial roll-out of the cloud, many struggle to operate it effectively post-deployment. Under certain circumstances, a fully managed OpenStack can also be a cheaper option than the self-managed one. We have recently published a webinar in which we demonstrated a detailed cost analysis of both options.

Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) was officially released on April 23. This is the latest Ubuntu Long Term Support (LTS) release, with security patches and updates available until 2025. If you are currently using an older version of Ubuntu, you may be interested in upgrading. In this tutorial, we will show how to safely upgrade from Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver), the previous LTS, to the current one.

One of the most exciting security enhancements in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) is the ability to use the Fast Identity Online (FIDO) or Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) devices with SSH. By using a second authentication factor via a device, users can add another layer of security to their infrastructure through a stronger and yet still easy to use mechanism for authentication. Ubuntu 20.04 LTS includes this feature out of the box through the latest version of OpenSSH 8.2.

Confluent Platform is an event streaming platform built on Apache Kafka. If you’re using Kafka as a data pipeline between microservices, Confluent Platform makes it easy to copy data into and out of Kafka, validate the data, and replicate entire Kafka topics. We’ve partnered with Confluent to create a new Confluent Platform integration.

Is it week 6 or 8 of telework now? I can't keep up, and it's probably not worth counting anymore. By now, all agencies have a majority of their employees working remotely and adjusting to the new normal; and we, at Splunk, are as well. In a way — like our CIO, Steve McMahon, puts it — we did have an early start.

Patch Manager Plus recently joined ManageEngine’s flagship unified endpoint management software, Desktop Central, in SoftwareWorld’s list of Top 10+ Best Endpoint Protection Software in 2020. In the platform’s review of several alternative tools, both ManageEngine products received a score of 98/100.

Stateful workloads in Kubernetes need to be able to access persistent volumes across the cluster. Storage Classes represent different storage types in Kubernetes. A storage provisioner backs each storage class. Most commonly used cloud providers have storage provisioners, which offer different capabilities based on the underlying cloud. There are also a wide variety of storage provisioners available to Kubernetes, based on the cloud provider in use.

So, we’ve passed the first quarter of 2020. What have we learned? You don’t need us to tell you that, but robots are still cool As usual, this State of Robotics post discusses work the Ubuntu robotics team has done this past April, and some interesting projects we’ve seen in the community. Unfortunately, we had a total of zero submissions to be included this month, hopefully not a sign of the times.