Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As Microsoft is forever releasing new functionality within Azure and all its offerings its often hard to keep abreast of the latest changes in technology. To do so, we here at SmiKar Software often follow influential and knowledgeable people that are experts in the their fields, to keep up to date ourselves. In no particular order, here are some of the noteworthy Azure Blogs that we follow.

Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) form the backbone of the product delivery lifecycle. A well tuned, fault tolerant and scalable CI/CD pipeline is very important to support modern Agile teams. Despite obvious business advantages, a rapid release approach combined with continuous change processes resulting from DevOps principles will in the long run generate new challenges. The entire process needs to be carefully examined and controlled.

No matter the application or strengths of your Virtual Machine, it must rely on the resources you provide. In such a scenario, it is common to run into bottlenecks and performance issues that can undermine your operations’ productivity. Often, these bottlenecks present challenges to the team as frequent issues pose risks to the operation’s health.

This article aims to teach readers about K3s, its relation to kubernetes, and delves into the ways in which Relay uses these technologies. In this article, we refer to you, the reader, as a developer learning about k3s, kubernetes, and other cloud-native tech. Enjoy!

If you’ve deployed an application or service to the Amazon Web Service (AWS) cloud, you’ve probably made use of an EC2 instance. One of the decisions that you had to make before you could start a new instance, was which instance type to use. Choosing an EC2 instance type can be a complicated process. AWS organizes their instance types into instance families, and within an instance family, there are varying sizes from micro to 32xlarge.

In environments with large numbers of client machines, configuration management tools are often used to simplify and standardize the target state of each host in a seamless, automated and consistent manner. Software like CFEngine, Chef, Ansible, and others offer a high degree of granular control over software packaging and system configurations.

Deploying a stack into AWS is at the core of what Stackery helps you do. So much so that Stackery users deployed over 10,000 times last month! For the most part, this has been a manually executed process in our Web UI or command-line client. As teams grow and take on more work, fast and consistent deployments are key to scaling effectively. That’s why we’ve been working this year on continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) features, tailor-built for serverless applications.

Now you can go beyond measuring your bandwidth usage and regain control via Cloudsmith's new bandwidth controls for Entitlement tokens. You can craft tokens with individual usage limits using the UI, API, and CLI, allowing you to decide the exact level of usage for each token. Combining the new and existing limits for entitlement tokens, allowances are configurable to provide fine-grained control for any combination of properties.

Adopting Kubernetes and service-based architecture can bring many benefits to organizations – teams move faster and applications scale more easily. However, visibility into cloud costs is made more complicated with this transition. This is because applications and their resource needs are often dynamic, and teams share core resources without transparent prices attached to workloads.