Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

This checklist is here to help startups evaluate and improve their DevOps practices. Based on our experience with over 200 startup customers, it’s tailored for teams with little or no dedicated DevOps staff. The aim is to highlight areas where you can make improvements, not to point out failures. Use this list to measure where you are now and to plan for future progress, ensuring your startup can grow smoothly and effectively.

Working with Kubernetes Services is convenient, especially when you can deploy Load Balancers via cloud providers like AWS. At Qovery, we initially started with Kubernetes’ built-in Network Load Balancer (NLB). However, we decided to move to the AWS Load Balancer Controller (ALB Controller). In this article, I explain why we made this switch and how it benefits our infrastructure.

Accidentally deleting an application is bad, but accidentally deleting all of them is a lot worse. In this post, I show you how to avoid issues like the following: Argo CD finalizers is a built-in Argo CD feature that confuses many new users and can even result in accidental deletion if you’re not careful. If you see a resource managed by Argo CD that was supposed to be deleted but isn’t, then you can almost certainly blame a finalizer.

In today’s rapidly evolving technology landscape, Kubernetes has become essential for deploying and managing containerized applications. As organizations increasingly rely on Kubernetes to scale their operations, the need for robust guardrails becomes paramount. In this context, guardrails refer to the policies and mechanisms that ensure the safe and efficient operation of Kubernetes environments.

Teams adopting GitOps often ask how to use secrets with Argo CD. The official Argo CD page about secrets is unopinionated by design and simply lists a set of projects that can help you with secrets. We’ve seen several approaches to secret management. These include sealed secrets, the Argo CD Vault plugin, and the External Secret Operator. In this post, we showcase the External Secret Operator and Hashicorp Vault and focus on 2 important aspects.

It's not an understatement to say Dockerfiles are the underpinning of modern DevOps. Writing a simple Dockerfile that 'works' is relatively straightforward, but there are several tricks and tips that could significantly improve the build speed and efficiency of your container images. If your current Dockerfiles copy in multi gigabyte contexts, reinstall dependencies on every build, or use only a single stage, we need to talk.

July has been an exciting month for us here at Cycle! We've had our heads down, and have made significant advancements and launched a number of new features aimed at enhancing the overall experience for our users. As we transition into August, we're thrilled to share what we've accomplished during the month of July, and what lies ahead for the platform.