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

Testing locally with CircleCI runners

Many development teams start their CI/CD journey with a local build box (or six) that run their tests. In several mobile teams I worked on, for example, we had a few Mac Mini boxes with physical devices plugged in that we used for running local UI and unit tests. Eventually we migrated to a cloud-based solution, which brought us much greater stability and many new features. But moving to the cloud also meant our local hardware was obsolete.

Announcing lockc: Improving Container Security

The lockc project provides mandatory access controls (MAC) for container workloads. Its goal is to improve the current state of container/host isolation. The lockc team believes that container engines and runtimes do not provide enough isolation from the host, which I describe later in the “Why do we need it?” Section. In this blog post, I’ll provide an introduction to lockc, discuss why you need it and show you how to try it out for yourself.

Why COGS Isn't The Most Relevant Cost Metric For SaaS Companies

For most SaaS companies, COGS (which stands for cost of goods sold) is used to calculate gross margin and profit. COGS is an accepted term with a specific definition under U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) — and is widely used as part of calculations to gauge the health and valuation of a company. Like many accounting practices, COGS stems from the industrial era, when most businesses were concerned with the creation of physical goods.

How To Select The Right NaaS Partner

The end-goal for a CIO adopting a Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) approach is to create a predictable, cloud-like consumption model for enterprise infrastructure. NaaS is designed to ensure that the enterprise network is state of the art and continually adopts innovations, frees the enterprise IT staff from monitoring tasks, rolls up the range of SLAs, and reduces the need for specialist skills in-house.

How to be an authentic leader in tech w/ Tutti Taygerly | The StackPod EP #3

Welcome to the third episode of the StackPod, with Tutti Taygerly. Tutti is a leadership and executive coach with 20+ years of design experience across large companies, design agencies and startups. She now teaches women and men to be authentic leaders. Using all lessons Tutti learned along the way, she now helps women ánd men to be the leader in tech they want to be, by, basically, being true to themselves. In this episode, Anthony talks to Tutti about her journey, she shares concrete tips to stay authentic ánd she spills the details about her new book that just came out.

Implementing SRE at the largest online retailer of NL and Belgium w/ Bart Enkelaar (bol.com) | EP #5

For the fifth episode of the StackPod, we invited Bart Enkelaar. Bart is a lead SRE at the largest online retailing platform in the Netherlands and Belgium: bol.com. He's been a backend engineer for 13 years and is now responsible for setting up site reliability engineering across more than a hundred DevOps teams. In this episode, Bart and Anthony talk about.

What Is Load Balancing

Load balancing means splitting up network traffic so that you can distribute it evenly across a group of backend servers. For example, if you run two web servers, both hosting a copy of the same website, then you can balance the traffic across them, sending half to one and half to the other. The goal of load balancing is to increase the availability of your website or web-based application by routing a portion of requests to each server.

8 Signs You Have a Cloud Optimization Problem

In a survey we conducted last year, we discovered that many enterprises overestimate their ability to optimize their hybrid cloud infrastructures. More than three-quarters of respondents gave themselves high marks for a range of capabilities. Here’s the exact breakdown of the number who rated their abilities a 4 or 5 out of 5: This sounds like great news, except there’s a problem. When we asked about how easy it is to get a global view of cloud costs, 42% said that it takes some effort.

Canonical Kubernetes for Financial Services

Adopting a container-first approach represents an unrivalled opportunity for financial institutions to increase system efficiency and resource utilisation, improve security, introduce automation, and accelerate innovation. Containers offer a logical packaging tool in which applications can be decoupled from the underlying infrastructure on which they run.