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The latest News and Information on DevOps, CI/CD, Automation and related technologies.

What developers get, out-of-the-box, from the most generous free plan anywhere

Freemium plans are a great way for companies to introduce developers to their products and offer a hands-on demonstration of the value they provide. But it can be extremely frustrating for developers when a free tier limits access to key features or doesn’t provide enough capacity to evaluate how the product performs in real-world development scenarios.

Podcast: Break Things on Purpose | Unpopular Opinions

Time for a bit of a review! Join Jason as he looks back on some previous guests who have shared some opinions that range from the idiosyncratic to down right unpopular. Pulling from a handful of “Breaking Things” interviews, Jason covers death to VPNs, to the validity of “AI Ops,” check out the litany!

Config best practices: Docker layer caching

Let’s face it: Creating the optimal CI/CD workflow is not always a simple task. In fact, writing effective and efficient configuration code is the biggest hurdle that many developers face in their DevOps journey. But you don’t need to be an expert to set up a fast, reliable testing and deployment infrastructure. With a few straightforward techniques, you can optimize your config.yml file and unleash the full potential of your CI/CD pipelines.

CloudFormation to secure and manage apps across multiple clusters and clouds

If you are not familiar with CloudFormation, an easy way to define it is AWS CloudFormation is an AWS service that uses template files to automate the setup of resources. It can also be described as an infrastructure automation or Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tool. You can use CloudFormation to automate the configuration of workloads that run on the most popular AWS services, including their managed Kubernetes offering, the Elastic Kubernetes Service, or EKS.

Key metrics for monitoring Azure SQL databases

Microsoft Azure SQL Database is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) database offering for modern cloud applications. It’s a fully managed service that runs on the latest version of the SQL Server database engine, enabling you to create highly available and performant database instances without needing to maintain hardware upgrades, patches, or backups.

Tools for collecting Azure SQL Database data

In Part 1 of this series, we discussed key metrics for monitoring Microsoft Azure SQL databases. We also looked at how your database resource and audit logs complement metrics to provide more insight into database performance, activity, and security. In this post, we’ll show you how to collect metrics and logs from your database instances and monitor them with Azure’s monitoring and reporting tools.

Monitor Azure SQL databases with Datadog

In Part 2 of this series, we showed you how to monitor Azure SQL Database metrics and logs using the Azure platform. In this post, we will look at how you can use Datadog to monitor your Azure SQL databases alongside other technologies in your infrastructure. Datadog provides turn-key integrations for Azure along with more than 500 other technologies, enabling you to track long-term performance trends across all systems in your infrastructure, not just your SQL databases.

How to prepare for a product design interview

As the well-known saying goes, by failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail. This might not be true of everything in life, but it certainly is true of job interviews. Whether you’re preparing for a product design interview at Redgate, or elsewhere, here are some key considerations to help ensure that you get your preparations right.