Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Kafka is an open source real-time streaming messaging system and protocol built around the publish-subscribe system. In this system, producers publish data to feeds for which consumers are subscribed to. With Kafka, clients within a system can exchange information with higher performance and lower risk of serious failure. Instead of establishing direct connections between subsystems, clients communicate via a server which brokers the information between producers and consumers.

Creating a topic in production is an operative task that requires awareness and preparation. In this tutorial, we’ll explain all the parameters to consider when creating a new topic in production. Setting the partition count and replication factor is required when creating a new Topic and the following choices affect the performance and reliability of your system.

It’s the night before a big deadline, and just before you press the button to deploy, you notice a small but important bug! You open a terminal, type in the command to run the code—and all you see is a page of errors. It’s these palm-sweating moments that make us wonder whether we made the correct career decision. Configuring our systems and keeping them working is a struggle most of us deal with regularly. Ruby Version Manager (RVM) attempts to solve this problem.

Logstash is the “L” in the ELK Stack — the world’s most popular log analysis platform and is responsible for aggregating data from different sources, processing it, and sending it down the pipeline, usually to be directly indexed in Elasticsearch. Logstash can pull from almost any data source using input plugins, apply a wide variety of data transformations and enhancements using filter plugins, and ship the data to a large number of destinations using output plugins.

Single Sign-On (SSO) is a valuable tool for enterprise companies managing multiple users across networks. Because user management becomes so difficult when dealing with hundreds or thousands of users, many companies use an advanced system like AWS to take care of it all.

Whether a team is one person or one hundred, automated testing uncovers issues in an application before the code is deployed to production. The earlier a problem is diagnosed, the cheaper and less impact it has on you (the developer) and the organization.

Five worthy reads is a regular column on five noteworthy items we’ve discovered while researching trending and timeless topics. This week, we explore how the agile philosophy can help organizations manage their operations.

How are you deploying your applications in 2019? Are you using containers yet? According to recent research over 80% of you are. If you are within this group, were you initially sold on the idea of containers but found that in reality, the complexity involved with this approach makes it a difficult trade-off to justify? The community is aware of this and has come up with a remedy to ease the pain, and it’s called container orchestration.

At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU in Barcelona, the Grafana Labs team delivered four well-received talks as well as a keynote in front of thousands of attendees. In case you missed the conference (or you want to watch the sessions again!), check out the links to our recap blog posts or watch the talks below.

As the problems we tackle get more complex, the nature of project teams is changing. Here’s what you need to know (and what you should change) in order to be successful.