Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The direction of travel for business technology is one-way. The momentum towards strategies around decentralised, hybrid technologies is unstoppable. Examples abound, from the composable software stacks of e-commerce to the ongoing death of monolithic ERP. Modern, digitally-driven business is based on a dynamic alignment of resources, data and technology at the granular level, which is then coordinated precisely.

Microsoft Azure, one of the leading cloud computing platforms, provides various services that enable businesses to run and manage applications efficiently. Among these services are virtual machines (VMs), which offer scalable computing resources to accommodate the diverse requirements of modern applications. In this article, we will delve into the different Azure VM types available and guide you on how to select the most suitable option for your specific needs.

ChatGPT has been the talk of the town for more than four months now. As the first ever artificial intelligence (AI) -powered chatbot, it has quickly gained immense popularity, helping students, engineers and even executives generate content, write and debug code and run market analyses. But could ChatGPT be used for anything other than natural language processing (NPL)? Could it, for example, assist businesses with strategic decision-making? I decided to try it out.

Over the last five years, there has been a constant push to move infrastructure to the Cloud, which accelerated further during the pandemic. It is becoming clear that for a proportion of organisations, the Cloud is not always the best route and that an on-premise (also known as on-prem, on-premises) or a hybrid model is most beneficial. On-premise relates to where IT infrastructure is located; this can be physically in a building, usually in a server room.

During my recent work on extending our GitLab packaging capabilities, I came across various types of tokens that can be used to authenticate users, services, and pipelines while using GitLab CI/CD. Each token has its unique features and use cases that can help ensure the security and integrity of your GitLab environment. By understanding the features and use cases of each token, you can leverage them to enhance your GitLab CI/CD workflows and ensure the security of your GitLab environment.

Catastrophic failures — such as a security breach or a complete outage leading to an unavailable product or service — are classified as Sev0 incidents. On a severity scale of 1–3, Sev0 is dire. It brings business to a complete standstill and may lead to loss of revenue and a damaged reputation. A Sev0 incident usually has no quick workaround; it requires a coordinated effort beyond the engineering team to diagnose, correct, and manage.

DHCP is dead; long live DHCP. Yes, the end-of-life announcement for ISC DHCP means that the ISC will no longer provide official support or updates for the software. Our ever-faithful, omnipresent friend — the familiar dhcpd daemon — is retiring, albeit over a really long walk to that cabin in the mountains. While the software will continue to function, it will become increasingly vulnerable to breakage, security vulnerabilities, and other issues over time as the software ages.