Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

This is the second in my series on the cloud. I started writing about cloud visibility and in this article, we take a look at cloud costs. If we look at the evolution of computing over the past 30 or so years, it has always been about monumental shifts in technology, which drive further and further innovation, efficiencies and – seemingly – cost reduction.

GitLab CI/CD is a tool that is built into GitLab. It allows you to create automated tasks that you can use to form a Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery / Deployment process. You configure GitLab CI/CD by adding a yaml file (called `.gitlab-ci.yml`) to your source repository. This file creates a pipeline, which will then run when a code change is pushed to the repository. Pipelines are made up of a series of stages, and each stage can each contain a number of jobs or scripts.

Nowadays, having no strong internet presence means people not knowing about your brand. Fortunately, there are numerous online business tools available, which could help you set up and manage your website. From the design, website development to social media and everything in between managing your online presence is paramount. Having an internet presence means reinforcing your brand, boosting your marketing endeavor, and most of all help connect with customers.

The frequency and volume of ransomware attacks have increased dramatically in the past few years. Few people in the tech industry will forget the 2017 WannaCry attack, which infected over 200,000 computers in 150 countries worldwide and brought down part of the U.K.’s National Health Service, or the 2019 RobbinHood attack, which brought the Baltimore government to a standstill for nearly two weeks.

If you’re a Marvel® Comics fan, you might have heard about the superhero named Darwin. Darwin can evolve based on need and environment. For instance, he can acquire night vision for his evening’s mission or develop gills if swimming underwater. As with Darwin, adaptation is an essential skill for many IT operations superheroes out there as well, tough times or not.

Performance has been a top user concern and an area of investment for InfluxDB Cloud since launching a year ago. The theme of our recent performance push is aggregations; we took a vertical slice from backend platform to front-end user interface to improve aggregations across the full stack.

Software development (SDLC) value streams aren’t difficult to understand; you correlate all activity in the development process from planning to prod and relate activity to key objectives such as impact on revenue, application quality and user satisfaction. Unfortunately, most organizations approach value streams on an ad-hoc, manual basis. This approach to value streams requires significant effort, is prone to error and creates huge opportunity costs.

I have recently been heads-down working on a large Splunk Cloud PoV (20+ TB / day), and the customer asked if Splunk supported their forwarding technology called Vector. I had never heard of Vector, so I took a note to do further research. I couldn’t find anyone else at Splunk who had seen this technology before, so I embarked on a little research project. What I discovered surprised me—Vector is actually fairly powerful, and cool!