Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

January 2022

Single-command Docker environments on any machine with Multipass

Multipass exists to bring Ubuntu-based development to the operating system of your choice. Whether you prefer the GUI of macOS (even on M1), Windows or any other Linux, the unmatched experience of developing software on Ubuntu is there at your fingertips, just one “multipass launch” away. Today, the Multipass team is delighted to enhance this experience for developers working with containerised applications!

Model driven observability with Prometheus, Alertmanager, Grafana and Loki

The end-to-end monitoring of complex software systems is difficult, toil-intensive and error-prone. Developers, SREs and Platform teams must continuously invest effort in setting up and maintaining the monitoring setups that underpin the observability of their systems, or accept the risk of being unaware of ongoing issues and their impact on end users. Enter model-driven observability powered by Juju!

Understanding bare metal Kubernetes

Bare metal Kubernetes is a powerful set of technologies that builds on the best ideas behind the public and private cloud, yet abstracts away some toilsome aspects related to virtualisation management and networking. For operators and users, it provides significant benefits, making it easier and faster to ship and maintain complex, distributed applications.

Smart, agile MLOps on any cloud - Canonical releases Charmed Kubeflow 1.4

Today, the Canonical Data Platform team announced the release of Charmed Kubeflow 1.4 - the state-of-the-art MLOps platform. The new release enables data science teams to securely collaborate on AI/ML innovation on any cloud, from concept to production.

Ubuntu introduces the Ubuntu Security Guide to ease DISA-STIG compliance

January 17th: London, UK – Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, the world’s most popular operating system across private and public clouds, now offers the Ubuntu Security Guide tooling for compliance with the DISA Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG) in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. The new automated tooling builds on Canonical’s track record of designing Ubuntu for high security and regulated workloads, powering U.S. government agencies, prime contractors, and service providers.

CIS benchmark compliance: Introducing the Ubuntu Security Guide

The CIS benchmark has hundreds of configuration recommendations, so hardening and auditing a Linux system manually can be very tedious. Every administrator of systems that need to comply with that benchmark would wish that this process is easily usable and automatable. Why is that? Manual configuration of such a large number of rules leads to mistakes – mistakes that cause not only functional problems, but may also cause security breaches.

Canonical Kubernetes for Financial Services

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.

Building cost-efficient open source cloud operations

On average, 55% of IT budgets are spent on operations, keeping the lights on. Organisations are constantly trying to find the right balance between running efficient operations and exploring the new possibilities of digital transformation. And as more organisations move towards the cloud, many missed expectations occur. But how can an organisation build the right strategy to minimise the skill gap and spend less on operations while increasing efficiency and innovation?

OpenStack challenges 2022

Happy New Year 2022! The fireworks are all fired, the champagne is over. It is time to get back to work. We are glad to see you here though. 2021 was a good year for OpenStack and its Ubuntu-based community. First, we all have seen Ubuntu becoming the number one operating system (OS) for OpenStack deployment. Then, the Open Infrastructure Foundation (OIF) reported explosive growth in the number of production OpenStack clouds. The community grew and settled on the most convenient platform.

Application composability and the shipping container

The previous blog post talked about the composability of applications. The key element for composing applications is defining the relations between application elements. And supporting relations is one of the advantages of the Charmed Operator Framework – including its runtime, the Charmed Operator Lifecycle Manager.

Application composability - a cloud computing perspective

Let’s remember the time in the 2000s when companies introduced their cloud computing offerings at a large scale. New services were put into the popular IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS categories. New kinds of storage and messaging technologies were promoted. Also, novel approaches were discussed, such as designing applications for horizontal scalability and eventual consistency.

Deploy and maintain applications with Charmed Operators

Recently, I remembered a situation when I was in elementary school and visited a friend at his house. At some point, his mother wanted us to go to a neighbour and ask to borrow some eggs. We went a few houses down, opened the garden gate, entered through the door to the house, and arrived in the kitchen calling out for the person. But no one was at home, so we left and returned without eggs.