Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

If you’re running a production application, you need metrics. There are great products out there that allow you to gain visibility into how your application is performing, give some nice graphs, and charge you for it. In the Rails community, this is commonly achieved by using NewRelic and Skylight. But for some of us, we achieve visibility by using Prometheus and Grafana that we build and host ourselves.

In today’s software-driven economy, every organization faces an imperative to modernize the way they deliver software in order to adapt and enable the digital era — or perish. Digital transformation across industries is driving the need for IT to enable Cloud-Native applications. This has led enterprises to adopt Kubernetes as the most effective way to support cloud-native architectures and to modernize their applications and IT infrastructure.

Docker is a powerful tool for creating and deploying applications. It simplifies rolling out applications across multiple systems and is a useful tool for integrating new technologies. An application that runs using Docker will start up the same every time on every system. This means that if the application works on your local computer, it’ll work anywhere that supports Docker. That’s great news! It simplifies your development process and can be a powerful tool for continuous delivery.

Writing Go applications in an isolated environment with Docker comes with some great advantages. You get a clean GOPATH, the bare essentials for developing, and you can easily change which Go version you’re developing against. In this quick tutorial, we’re going to show you how to structure a Go application with Docker Compose as your development environment.

FireHydrant.io has a changelog feature with a Kubernetes integration. Building this integration was challenging because the knowledge about creating an event oriented system with the Kubernetes client-go project was not as easy to understand as I would have hoped.

We are very excited to announce Calico v3.7. Here are some highlights from the release.

Istio is a hot technology right now. Giants such as Google and IBM have devoted entire teams of engineers to the project to push it to production readiness. Since 1.0 has been released recently, I wanted to write down some of the things that confused me coming from a strictly Kubernetes only world where we have Ingress controllers and Service load balancers and how Istio takes these same concepts but on stimulants.

Docker Compose is a great tool to develop your Ruby on Rails application locally. It allows you to easily isolate your ruby environment, database, and even Redis if you use something like Sidekiq.

AWS Beanstalk allows you to spin up entire environments (EC2 instances, ELBs, etc.) to support an application without you having to configure the resources manually. However, since it’s a managed service, you have less visibility with traditional monitoring tools. As such, it becomes even more important to take advantage of the available monitoring tools in AWS. In this post, we’ll explain how to use CloudWatch to monitor Beanstalk and what is important to watch.