Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Accidental DBA is a term most IT pros are familiar with, and traditionally it describes an “on-top task” for the SysAdmin. It was followed by the “involuntary security admin,” a task carried out by network admins, as back in the days it was all about securing the perimeter. Now there are the clouds, but whose responsibility is it? Surely the SysAdmin again, as it’s just about infrastructure? But then there’s VPNs and BGP and load balancers—network territory!

When planning the SRE from home virtual even last month, one of the central themes was wellness and the need for self-care for SREs, especially during this time of crisis. Knowing how stressful an SRE’s day can be, combined that with a global pandemic and new working conditions, we knew we needed programming around SRE and IT wellness for SRE from Home. We’re all looking for ways to maintain a healthy work-life, but hearing this from your peers was especially important.

Anyone who’s ever played the game of chess knows there’s more than one way to reach a desired outcome. There are 400 possible setups after the first turn; 197,742 after the second; and just north of 120 million after the third—all of which are marching toward the same desired outcome. “So, what does any of this have to do with DevOps?” you ask? Fair question.

How much does your Kubernetes service cost to operate? This seems like a simple question, right? It’s one thing to say how much your Kubernetes cluster itself costs to operate — that, after all, is a group of real servers, associated with a specific number.

Canonical is proud to announce the availability of OpenStack Charms 20.08. This new release introduces a range of exciting features and several improvements which enhance Charmed OpenStack.

Still counting on passwords to protect your workstation? When set up properly, alternatives to passwords provide a streamlined user experience while significantly improving security. These alternative authentication methods can also easily be combined to create a custom and adaptive authentication profile.

For IT teams it has never been an easy task to build and maintain an inventory of all the systems, software and hardware that organizations are reliant on to deliver their services and do something meaningful for the business with this information. As organizations grow they accumulate more and more asset and config data. Information inevitably ends up scattered across multiple, disconnected repositories; ITSM tools, service catalogs, software asset management systems, databases, spreadsheets etc.

The growth of Kubernetes has been stellar and K8s applications have grown in importance and complexity. Today, even configuring a single application can require creating many interdependent K8s sources that each depend on writing a detailed YAML manifest file. With this in mind, Helm as a package manager for Kubernetes is a major way users can make their K8s configurations reusable.

(Want your cloud apps managed? Reach out to Canonical now. You can also watch our webinar on why you should get your apps managed, and get your application reviewed by our app engineers.) PostgreSQL solves the problem of extensibility, in complex cloud environments. This statement is often thrown around, but why is it true? Should next-generation cloud-infrastructure still use it? Is it still relevant in an era of big data?