Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

December 2021

Log4j Detection with JFrog OSS Scanning Tools

The discovery of the Log4Shell vulnerability in the ubiquitous Apache Log4j package is a singular event in terms of both its impact and severity. Over 1 million attack attempts exploiting the Log4Shell vulnerability were detected within days after it was exposed, and it may take years before we see its full impact.

Codefresh 2021: Year In Review

Codefresh has a very clear mission to enable enterprise teams to confidently deliver software at scale. We are incredibly grateful to our customers who are succeeding with deployments to the cloud, on-prem, and at the edge. Codefresh is powering critical software delivery for some of the world’s most popular gaming and media companies as well as regulated environments in hospitals, at banks, and for defense. So this post is dedicated to all of you who have enabled Codefresh to grow!

Integrating GitOps with DevOps: implementing the best of both

GitOps has become a buzzword. Developers love it, because it folds DevOps into Git, a frequently used and familiar tool. Using one tool to manage multiple DevOps activities sounds fantastic, and it can be helpful for many. The truth is GitOps has limits. In this article, we explore DevOps and GitOps, compare their similarities and differences, and examine how their principles can work together to support your software development goals.

Rethinking Your Software Distribution Infrastructure

Accelerating software distribution is a critical part to enabling enterprise delivery at scale. Throughout the SDLC processes, we’re required to continuously distribute software packages — either to remote development teams as part of CI cycles, to production environments or devices for deployments, or for public downloads by your developers or partners ecosystem. The key attributes of Distribution workflows create network challenges around bandwidth, resiliency and availability.

All About Log4j/Log4Shell + Mitigation (CVE-2021-44228 and Beyond)

This article discusses the background, impact, identification, and mitigation of Log4Shell, one of the worst vulnerabilities to arise in the past decade. Here at Cloudsmith, security and privacy are paramount. As a hosted package management service helping customers distribute millions of packages worldwide, we're part of the story for securing software supply chains. Read on further to see how the vulnerability works and what you can protect yourself and your users.

QA Activities- What Should You Keep In Mind?

When your development team is under pressure to keep releasing new functionality in order to stay ahead of the competition, the time spent on quality assurance (QA) activities can feel like one overhead that you could do without. After all, with automated CI/CD pipelines enabling multiple deployments per day, you can get a fix out pretty quickly if something does go wrong – so why invest the time in testing before release? The reality is that scrimping on software testing is a false economy.

Object validation and conversion with Marshmallow in Python

Marshmallow is a Python library that converts complex data types to and from Python data types. It is a powerful tool for both validating and converting data. In this tutorial, I will be using Marshmallow to validate a simple bookmarks API where users can save their favorite URLs along with a short description of each site.

Your Log4shell Remediation Cookbook Using the JFrog Platform

Last week, a researcher from the Alibaba Cloud Security Team dropped a zero-day remote code execution exploit on Twitter, targeting the extremely popular log4j logging framework for Java (specifically, the 2.x branch called Log4j2). The vulnerability was originally discovered and reported to Apache by the Alibaba cloud security team on November 24th. MITRE assigned CVE-2021-44228 to this vulnerability, which has since been dubbed Log4Shell by security researchers.

Building Observability in Your CircleCI Deploy

With Liz Fong Jones, Principal Developer Advocate at Honeycomb and Ryan Pedersen, Senior Solutions Engineer at CircleCI In this talk, you’ll learn how Honeycomb keeps its CircleCI workflow duration at about 10 minutes per build through parallelizing build steps, using native container builders per architecture, and tracing execution of the build to know where to optimize.

Trigger your CircleCI pipelines from a GitHub Actions workflow

If you are already a GitHub user, you may know that GitHub Actions provides you with powerful tools to increase efficiencies in your software delivery life cycle. Actions can be impactful for team collaborations and process simplification. For example, you can automate things like building a container, welcoming new users to your open source projects, managing branches, or triaging issues.

How to define software failure

Two of the four DORA metrics, Change Failure Rate and MTTR, require that you first define what failure means. Does failure always mean incident? Or should failure mean rollback? In this video, Don walks you through a couple different ways to define failure, and how Sleuth does it today. SLEUTH A deploy-based DORA / Accelerate Metrics tracker both managers and developers love.

Stop Using Branches for Deploying to Different GitOps Environments

In our big guide for GitOps problems, we briefly explained (see points 3 and 4) how the current crop of GitOps tools don’t really cover the case of promotion between different environments or how even to model multi-cluster setups. The question of “How do I promote a release to the next environment?” is becoming increasingly popular among organizations that want to adopt GitOps.

Log4shell fix with the Bitbucket Cloud and Snyk integration

By now, you’re probably assessing your level of exposure — or are in the middle of remediating — the recently disclosed vulnerability known as Log4Shell. We recently introduced a native integration with Snyk, a leading provider of developer security solutions, to help you address zero-day vulnerabilities. Once enabled, Snyk scans your code and its dependencies, and alerts you about security vulnerabilities, including Log4j. All current versions of Log4j 2 up to 2.14.1 are vulnerable.

Build and deploy an ASP.NET Core application to Azure

Automating the deployment of a new web application and the release of feature updates goes a long way towards improving the productivity and efficiency of your development team. Another benefit of automation is that it minimizes or even eliminates repeated manual deployments. Manual deployments introduce the risk of human error during this critical part of the development process.

Using GitOps for Infrastructure and Applications With Crossplane and Argo CD

If you have been following the Codefresh blog for a while, you might have noticed a common pattern in all the articles that talk about Kubernetes deployments. Almost all of them start with a Kubernetes cluster that is already there, and then the article explains how to deploy an application on top. The reason for this simplification comes mainly from brevity and simplicity. We want to focus on the deployment part of the application and not its infrastructure just to make the article easier to follow.

Glide to JFrog DevSecOps with the New Experience

We’re excited to share with you that we have launched a completely new way to start using the JFrog DevOps Platform that you – as a developer – will love. We’ve provided a super-easy, developer-friendly path to discovering how Artifactory and Xray can help you produce safer apps, faster, getting started through the command line shell and IDE that you use every day.

Cloudsmith By the Numbers 2021

Another amazing year in the books! And even though we’ve done the ‘By the Numbers’ series for a few years now, this year’s numbers are the best (and biggest) yet. But even better than that? The people behind the numbers. Carrying on the growth we saw in 2020, the most important number to highlight this year is the massive increase in awesome Cloudsmithers we added to the team!

Startup Spaces: Technology Due Diligence 101 - Secrets from an Auditor

Hear from an experienced panel of Tech DD auditors, CTO’s and VCs about how you can pass your next Tech DD audit with flying colours. You’ll learn: Johann Romefort, Tech DD consultant and former CTO, MD at Techstars, is joined by special guests Luca Grulla, CTO at Signal AI, Zoé Constantin of Impact Partners, auditor Alyx Baldwin, and Felix Eichler, CTO & Co-Founder at Userlane. Learn what to expect during a technical audit and how to prepare — both logistically and mentally — for the entire process.

How AI and ML will impact the future of software development with Nathan Mellis

Rob sits down with Nathan Mellis, Director of Engineering at Modzy to discuss all things ML and AI in the space of software development. Get answers to questions like, Join this fascinating conversation of where the industry of software development is headed next.

Configuring multiple Docker services with different memory limits

Bitbucket Pipelines provides a feature that enables you to configure memory in Docker services (learn more on that here). We have related highly voted suggestion where customers would like to configure multiple Docker services, each with different memory configurations. Here’s a working example of how you can set memory limits to multiple Docker services and use the appropriate service depending on the step requirements.

Manage complex development projects by triggering pipelines from other pipelines

It is no secret that software development is becoming an increasingly complex process. The individual elements of software like apps, libraries, and services are interconnected and dependent on many other elements. Development teams deal with a whole ecosystem of services that they develop, maintain, or depend on, which in turn are dependent on other software ecosystems, maintained by separate teams. Maintaining this ecosystem is as complex as you might imagine.

Cloudsmith is ISO27001:2013 Certified

When planning our 2021 roadmap this time last year, one of the most prominent themes was security. Although we’re not solely in the security category, as a fully managed service in the heart of our customers’ software supply chains, it was always paramount for what we do and still is. Ensuring the integrity and privacy of customer data is our top priority.

Share and Reuse Your Argo Workflows with the Codefresh Hub for Argo

Anyone who builds a lot of Argo workflows knows that after a while you end up reusing the same basic steps over and over again. While Argo Workflows has a great mechanism to prevent duplicate work, with templates, these templates have mostly stayed in people’s private repositories and haven’t been shared with the broader community.

Day 2 Apps Deployed, the Database is on Fire

Use DevOps practices to deploy your database changes seamlessly! Join Robert Reeves of Liquibase and Melissa McKay of JFrog as they discuss the advantages of using tried and true DevOps methodologies and automation to keep your database driven application up and running in production. The 2021 State of DevOps Report tells us that elite performers are 3.4 times more likely to adopt database change management practices. DevOps is for everyone including our database professional friends.

Malicious npm Packages Are After Your Discord Tokens - 17 New Packages Disclosed

The JFrog Security research team continuously monitors popular open source software (OSS) repositories with our automated tooling, and reports any vulnerabilities or malicious packages discovered to repository maintainers and the wider community. Most recently we disclosed 11 malicious packages in the PyPI repository, a discovery that shows attacks are getting more sophisticated in their approach.

The Pain of Infrequent Deployments Webinar (Part 2 of 3)

A critical metric for a delivery process for software development is the deployment frequency. Meaning the measurement of how often applications are deployed to production is vital. Most organizations strive to deploy as often as possible, however, the benefits of doing this are overlooked due to ongoing technical debates and legacy ways. In Part 2, Hannah covers Metrics Matter in DevOps, identifying the deployment solutions and metrics.

Elastic Observability 7.16: Ad hoc analytics and CI/CD pipeline visibility

Elastic Observability 7.16 introduces curated data exploration views for ad hoc analysis and further extends visibility into complex and distributed systems with the general availability (GA) of dozens of prebuilt Elastic Agent data integrations, observability tooling for continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, and a new native data source integration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) FireLens. These new features allow customers to.

Using Codefresh with GKE Autopilot for native Kubernetes pipelines and GitOps deployment

Several companies nowadays offer a cloud-native solution that manages Kubernetes applications and services. While these solutions seem easy at first glance, in reality, they still require manual maintenance. As an example, an important decision for any Kubernetes cluster is the number of nodes and the autoscaling rules you define.

CircleCI Scheduled Pipelines | Getting Started

In this demo, Zan Markan, CircleCI developer advocate, explains how scheduled pipelines work, common use cases, and how to get started. In a hurry? Skip to what you're looking for: What are scheduled pipelines? Scheduled Pipelines are a new functionality from CircleCI to help customers run scheduled work. They are intended to replace scheduled workflows, which will eventually be deprecated. if you have been using CircleCI for some time you likely have encountered them.

Deploying a Gatsby site to Netlify using CircleCI

Gatsby is a static website and application generator that makes building powerful React-based frontend applications easy and effective. With over fifty thousand stars on GitHub (51.5k as at the time of this writing), Gatsby stands as one of the most widely used React frameworks. Gatsby is so popular that most hosting platforms offer custom support for the framework. Netlify is one of those platforms.

Unit testing vs integration testing

Software is one of the most complex tools invented for practical use. One misplaced character can break an entire application. So, careful testing is an essential requirement before publishing any code. In this article, you will learn about two fundamental types of software testing, unit testing and integration testing, and how your team can implement them in your CI/CD pipelines to validate your code quickly and deliver new features to your users with confidence.

Preparing your team for continuous deployment

A key goal for any DevOps team is to shorten the software development cycle and provide continuous delivery of high-quality software. Instead of continuing to the next logical goal, continuous deployment, most companies stop here. Developed code reaches the testing phase automatically, then, successful testing triggers a manual acceptance step. Only then is the application deployed into production.

Applied GitOps with Kustomize

Have you always wanted to have different settings between production and staging but never knew how? You can do this with Kustomize! Kustomize is a CLI configuration manager for Kubernetes objects that leverage layering to preserve the base settings of the application. This is done by overlaying the declarative YAML artifacts to override default settings without actually making any changes to the original manifest.