Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

It is impossible to overestimate the importance of a strong development environment when scaling your team’s capacity. Nowadays, most organizations use Git, and one of the popular and successful development models used by many organizations is Gitflow. When making use of such models, continuous integration (CI) is key as it enables faster project delivery and offers reduced risk and expenses thanks to self-managed and easy-to-control dedicated teams.

Every minute of server downtime can cost you serious revenue. 98% of organizations revealed that a single hour of downtime costs them over $100,000. The good news is that you can effectively prevent such losses with server monitoring software. Being a critical piece of your technical infrastructure, servers must be continuously tracked for their performance, and health. Efficient server monitoring lets you resolve issues before they become too critical.

This is the third blog post in a series on “Smart Cities and Urban Environments” and the implications for networks & telecoms. About 55% of the world’s population lives in urban areas; for developed OECD countries the figure is about 80%. Urbanisation is good for economic and even environmental reasons, but brings challenges for transport, roads and personal mobility*.

Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines have become fundamental to modern software development and code deployment. Implementing CI/CD practices can let teams deploy code more quickly and efficiently. But with these methods come a number of new challenges: bad code deploys are a major source of downtime and can lead to a loss of revenue and customer trust.

Over the last few months, I’ve been listening and involved in conversations about Kubernetes (k8s) and trying to identify the common topics that creates debate on whether it’s a “good” or “bad” idea. There are sensible points of view on both sides of the debate.

Looking back at my years working with infrastructure and going through it’s changes, I believe its time we start to rethink Operations because clearly this model of Ops as cluster or infrastructure admins does not scale. Developers will always out-demand their capacity to supply. Either your headcount is out of control or your ability to innovate and deliver is severely hamstrung. Operations becomes this interrupt-driven thing where we’re just fighting fires as they happen.

Software development has greatly evolved over the years. Serverless is an emerging software architecture that could resolve issues when it comes to developing software solutions. As software developers, you’re tasked with server setup, installing the software, operating systems requirements, server management and maintenance, designing an application with high fault tolerance and availability, as well as managing load balance and more.

Canonical has been working closely with NVIDIA for many years to fuel innovation and support open source software with the power of accelerated processing. That already allowed us to jointly deliver GPU acceleration into Linux, OpenStack and container workloads on traditional datacenter servers. We continued working together, with Ubuntu forming the base operating system for NVIDIA DGX systems, including the latest NVIDIA DGX A100 system.

"A long time ago in a data centre far, far away.... Our first episode takes us back to the early days of launching Civo, where we had a fledgling Ceph cluster with a bunch of SSDs in each. Those were darker times, in the early days of OpenStack. As time went by the cluster grew, new bigger nodes were added along with bigger disks.