Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

If you don't know what a "cron job" is or how the cron job expression syntax works (and at this point are too afraid to ask), you're in the right place. In this article, we'll dive into what is a cron job, how they work, and the details that often get overlooked, like cron job schedule syntax and common cron job errors.

On 24 July 2023, security researchers from Google’s Information Security Engineering team disclosed a hardware vulnerability affecting AMD’s Zen 2 family of microprocessors. They dubbed this vulnerability “Zenbleed” (CVE-2023-20593), evoking memories of previous vulnerabilities like HeartBleed and hinting at its possible impact.

Building and deploying highly scalable, distributed applications in the ever-changing landscape of software development is only half the journey. The other half is monitoring your application states and instances while recording accurate metrics. There are moments when you wish to check how many resources are being consumed, how many files are under access by the specialized process, etc. These metrics provide valuable insights into our tech stack execution and management.

Prometheus is a platform for real-time systems and event monitoring and alerting. The Prometheus project is free, open-source, and available on GitHub. Originally developed at SoundCloud, Prometheus became a project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in 2016, alongside other popular frameworks such as Kubernetes. The core of the project is the Prometheus server, which acts as the system’s “brain” by collecting various metrics and storing them in a time-series database.

The past decade has seen a drastic growth in the adoption of public cloud. One of the primary reasons for this is its cheaper infrastructure and ease of scale. With such rapid adoption of public cloud, the need for infrastructure automation also arises. This is because teams want to quickly provision infrastructure and automate tasks that previously took weeks in the case of traditional data centers, down to minutes in the public cloud.

Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD), the ability to adapt swiftly to fluctuating workloads is paramount. Kubernetes, with its dynamic orchestration capabilities, offers an invaluable toolset for achieving seamless scalability. This article explores the concept of Kubernetes autoscaling and its pivotal role in optimising CI/CD pipelines.

The ability to manage IP addresses within a network is crucial for effective network management, especially as networks become more complex and have to manage more demanding loads. Assigning hundreds or even thousands of IP addresses to devices that may be highly distributed or disparate is no simple task. Once devices leave the network, those IP addresses may need to be deleted, plus there’s always the risk of IP address conflict.

It’s been another busy few months here at Gremlin. Overall, our team has been working on feature improvements to enable teams to measurably improve the reliability of their systems, whether that’s through broadening platform support so you can run Gremlin in more places, making it easier than ever to identify reliability risks, or improving reporting so you can manage reliability programs effectively at enterprise scale. Here’s a summary of what’s new.

In August, a ransomware attack hit another company. Unfortunately, it hit a regional cloud provider in Europe this time, and we can call this a “critical hit.” So far, we know a virtual server got compromised and used as a jump host; from there, the attacker started to encrypt all volumes in the same domain. Based on pure luck or some profound reconnaissance, the same server migrated into a different data center and continued its unplanned job from there.