Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

This blog post is part of our data centre networking series.

The recent contexts have shown that enterprises needed to take a different approach regarding their digital transformation and its prioritisation. They’ve experienced the need to run new configurations and operations remotely on their infrastructure. This quickly showed the benefits of automation solutions to run those changes from few central locations, which highly facilitated the task of systems and network admins.

Bare metal Kubernetes (K8s) is now easier than ever. Spectro Cloud has recently posted an article about integrating Kubernetes with MAAS (Metal-as-a-Service. In the article, they describe how they have created a provider for the Kubernetes Cluster API for Canonical MAAS (Metal-as-a-Service). This blog describes briefly the benefits of bare metal K8s, the challenges it presents, and how the work by Saad Malik and the team from Spectro Cloud solves those challenges.

Canonical’s Ubuntu Frame is an easy-to-use, reliable and secure fullscreen shell to power edge devices, with 10 years of support from Canonical. October 6th, 2021: Canonical announces the release of Ubuntu Frame, a solution that allows developers to easily build and deploy graphical applications for interactive kiosks, digital signage solutions, or any other products that require a graphical output.

The Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem is expanding at a rapid rate, with the number of devices growing every year. The increase in physical hardware being manufactured multiplies the amount of software needed to perform various functions on new platforms. There are a range of IoT use cases, including voice-controlling the lights in your home, monitoring air pollution, or the parking feature of a self-driving car.

Auckland, New Zealand – Portainer announced the launch of its Portainer Business Charmed Operator, allowing for seamless integration with Canonical’s Charmed Kubernetes distribution. The new Portainer charm allows users of Canonical’s Charmed Kubernetes distribution to automatically install and integrate Portainer Business as part of the Kubernetes cluster deployment process, using Juju, the Charmed Operator framework.

LONDON, UK – Canonical announces the lifecycle extension of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS ‘Trusty Tahr’ and 16.04 LTS ‘Xenial Xerus’ to a total of ten years. This lifecycle extension enables organizations to balance their infrastructure upgrade costs, by giving them additional time to implement their upgrade plan.

This post is about alert rules. Operators should ensure a baseline of observability for the software they operate. In this blog post, we cover Prometheus alert rules, how they work and their gotchas, and discuss how Prometheus alert rules can be embedded in Juju charms and how Juju topology enables the scoping of embedded alert rules to avoid inaccuracies.

London, UK – Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, today announced the completion of the MSP Cloud Verify Certification (MSPCV) for its support and managed services. The MSPCV certification, further strengthens Canonical’s industry-leading open source offering, reassuring customers in all industries that they can securely consume open source in a regulated fashion that complies with all the industry standards and best practices.

Robotics is everywhere. Researchers and companies are all working on groundbreaking developments, either improving robotics to be state of the art or pursuing innovative applications. That is the main aim of this monthly blog; to show you what we are capable of doing today and to inspire you to think about the bigger picture. For the benefit of your current or future robotics project!