Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

HIPAA Compliance 101: Securing Patient Data with DevOps

In healthcare, protecting patient data isn’t just a requirement—it’s essential. As a tech lead or DevOps professional, understanding HIPAA compliance is crucial. This guide breaks down the essentials and shows how DevOps practices can streamline the process.

Rancher Live: The nuts and bolts of platform engineering

Is platform engineering just another fancy word for DevOps? If you've ever wondered this, you're not alone! In this Rancher Live episode, Divya Mohan will host Colin Griffin, co-chair of the CNCF Platforms Working Group, to deconstruct the newest buzzword in town. Together, they will also be delving into some of the artefacts from the Working Group - namely, the Platform Engineering Maturity Model and the Platforms Whitepaper - to understand how to measure the value of the practice effectively.

How to install Calico Enterprise on Windows with HostProcess containers

When enterprises transition to a microservices model, they often need to migrate their legacy applications to the new infrastructure. One popular framework used for these traditional applications is.Net. Due to migration, enterprises require the ability to run Windows containers in their Kubernetes infrastructure.

Debugging your Rancher Kubernetes Cluster the GenAI Way with k8sgpt, Ollama & Rancher Desktop

The advancements in GenAI technology are creating a significant impact across domains/sectors, and the Kubernetes ecosystem is no exception. Numerous interesting GenAI projects and products have emerged aimed at enhancing the efficiency of Kubernetes cluster creation and management. From simplifying application containerization for engineers to addressing complex Kubernetes-related queries or troubleshooting issues within a cluster, GenAI demonstrates immense potential.

Day-0, Day-1, and Day-2 Operations: What Are the Differences?

Operations are the backbone of successful software delivery, but the specifics of each phase—Day-0, Day-1, and Day-2—often get overlooked. Understanding these phases can help you streamline deployments, reduce risks, and maintain robust, scalable systems. Let’s break down what each phase entails and explore their distinct activities, tools, and best practices.

Kubernetes Cost Optimization: 9+ Ways To Lower Costs in 2024

If cost optimization is your only reason for adopting Kubernetes and containers, you might be in for a rude surprise — many companies find that costs increase after moving to Kubernetes. Even companies who adopt Kubernetes for other reasons, like time-to-market advantages, should follow basic cost control best practices to stay within the budget. Optimizing cloud costs related to running Kubernetes doesn’t have to involve trade-offs for performance or availability.

The Essential Guide to Cloud Migration Planning

Cloud migration is the process of moving your infrastructure, applications, and data to the cloud. While the potential benefits—like cost savings, scalability, and modernization—are significant, the risks are just as high if you don’t have a solid plan in place. Without clear strategies, you could face unexpected costs, technical challenges, and security issues.

Container Monitoring Demo

Datadog Container Monitoring gives you real-time, end-to-end visibility into the health, security, and resource usage of your containerized environments. In this demo, we’ll show you how Datadog measures container health alongside security posture and resource utilization, offering end-to-end monitoring and optimization for your container ecosystem.

AWS EKS 101: When To Use And Tips To Optimize

According to Gartner, 90% of global organizations will run containerized applications in production by 2027. The need for continuous innovation, performance, and availability is driving this shift to meet customer expectations. Kubernetes plays a crucial role in this transformation. It offers a robust open-source platform for managing containerized applications. Yet, ensuring optimal application performance is only possible with observability.

Mastering Kubernetes Logging - Detailed Guide to kubectl logs

Effective logging is crucial for maintaining and troubleshooting applications running in Kubernetes clusters. As applications become more complex, ensuring they perform optimally has never been more critical. In this comprehensive guide, we'll explore Kubernetes logging using kubectl, covering everything from basic commands to advanced techniques and best practices.

Understanding Kubernetes namespaces and how to monitor them with Site24x7

Kubernetes namespaces are a fundamental way of organizing your Kubernetes cluster resources to isolate groups of resources for specific needs. With better resource management, easy organization, robust security, and high scalability, Kubernetes namespaces help immensely in development, team handling, and application life cycle management. Site24x7 offers a strong platform for monitoring your Kubernetes namespaces so you can gain granular visibility into the performance and health of your deployment.

The Ultimate SOC 2 Compliance Checklist for 2024

Achieving SOC 2 compliance is not just an option—it’s a necessity. SOC 2 compliance demonstrates your organization’s commitment to data security, making it a critical component for businesses that manage sensitive customer information. Achieving this standard can be complex, but with the right guidance and tools, it becomes manageable. This guide will walk you through the key steps to achieving SOC 2 compliance.

Realistic Strategies for FinOps Driven K8s Optimization

Reduce node counts to drive down infrastructure costs (on-prem and in the cloud). Get an overview of common issues that drive excess cost and understanding the 3 core strategies for tackling them. Done right, you can reduce node counts, which in turn impacts infrastructure cost and potentially reduces expensive software licenses such as OpenShift. In this 20-min session we cover the 3 core strategies.

Tips for Monitoring Kubernetes Applications

Monitoring is the most important aspect of infrastructure operations. Effective monitoring strategies help optimize infrastructure usage, improve planning, and resolve incidents quickly. While monitoring preceded DevOps, DevOps has further transformed the software development process to the extent that monitoring also has to evolve.

Monitoring Kubernetes with Hosted Graphite by MetricFire

In this article, we will be looking into Kubernetes monitoring with Graphite and Grafana. Specifically, we will look at how your whole Kubernetes set-up can be centrally monitored through Hosted Graphite and Hosted Grafana dashboards. This will allow Kubernetes Administrators to centrally manage all of their Kubernetes clusters without setting up any additional infrastructure for monitoring.

Monitoring a K8s Cluster with MetricFire

Kubernetes (K8s) is a popular container orchestration solution, but monitoring its performance can be quite challenging. Luckily, there's a solution that makes it easier - MetricFire. It's a cloud-based monitoring and visualization platform that provides comprehensive metrics, alerts, and dashboards for K8s clusters. The platform offers amazing cloud-based monitoring and visualization services that can make the K8s monitoring seamless.

Tips for Monitoring Kubernetes Applications Test

Monitoring is the most important aspect of infrastructure operations. Effective monitoring strategies help optimize infrastructure usage, improve planning, and resolve incidents easily. While monitoring preceded DevOps, DevOps has further transformed the software development process to the extent that monitoring has to evolve as well.

Introduction to Monitoring Kubernetes

The growing adoption of microservices architecture also drives the adoption of containers to package, distribute and run the microservices. This requires orchestrators to handle the availability, performance, and deployments of those containers on the server. However, the entire setup around microservices, containerization, and orchestrators complicates logging and monitoring since various distributed and diversified applications interact with each other.

Strategies for Efficient Log Management in Large-Scale Kubernetes Clusters

Aliaksandr Valialkin, #VictoriaMetrics CTO present "Strategies for Efficient hashtag#LogManagement in Large-Scale hashtag#Kubernetes Clusters" at hashtag#FrOSCon. Large #Kubernetes clusters can generate significant volumes of logs, especially when housing thousands of running pods. This may demand substantial CPU, RAM, disk IO, and disk space for storing and querying large log volumes. In this talk, we will look into different strategies of storing those logs in #ElasticSearch, Grafana Loki and #VictoriaLogs and examine how we can save 10x or more on infrastructure costs.

Using K8S But Not Overhauling Your Devops Processes

Kubernetes is now the industry standard for cloud-based organizations. Slowly, many enterprises and mid-level companies are adopting it as the default platform for managing their applications. But we all know Kubernetes adoption has its challenges, as well as its associated costs. How do we decide when and what to migrate to Kubernetes? Does migrating to Kubernetes mean overhauling all DevOps processes? Adopting K8S should not lead to an overhaul of your DevOps process - it should complement it.

How to monitor your Kubernetes metrics server

In this article, we will examine a Kubernetes metrics server and its uses. We will also learn how to set one up and use it to monitor Kubernetes metrics. Finally, we will explore using Hosted Graphite by MetricFire to monitor Kubernetes metrics. To easily get started with monitoring Kubernetes clusters, check out our tutorial on using the Telegraf agent as a Daemonset to forward node/pod metrics to a data source and use that data to create custom dashboards and alerts.

3 Key Strategies for End-to-End DevOps Automation

DevOps automation is essential for speeding up delivery, minimizing errors, and boosting team collaboration. But selecting the right approach can make or break your organization’s agility and scalability. Let's break down three key approaches—DIY with Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and DevOps Automation Platforms—so you can identify the best strategy for your needs.

A data lake on your cloud with Spark, Kubernetes and OpenStack

Data lake is a very large scale data processing paradigm that disrupts the conventional data warehousing model. Data lakes can offer greater flexibility whilst retaining the benefits and efficiency of centralised data governance. With Canonical OpenStack private cloud platform, Kubernetes and Charmed Spark solutions, your data lake architecture can also benefit from extended flexibility and scalability whilst remaining cost effective to operate.

Optimizing DevOps with Kubernetes Ephemeral Environments: Efficient Testing and Deployment

Ephemeral environments transform software development by providing temporary, isolated spaces for testing and deploying microservices without affecting production. Given its robust orchestration capabilities, Kubernetes excels at creating these temporary environments, allowing teams to efficiently manage and scale containerized applications. By integrating tools like Helm and Kustomize, developers can maintain a codified version of their app and its dependencies.

Deploying Llama 3 and vLLM with Civo Cloud GPU: A Live Demo with @getpieces

Join us for an exciting live demo as we explore how AI can transform your DevOps workflow using Pieces and Civo. In this comprehensive walkthrough, we'll dive into deploying an open-source large language model on Kubernetes, setting up GPU clusters, and leveraging AI to streamline development tasks.

Mastering Node Affinity in Kubernetes

In the world of container orchestration, Kubernetes has emerged as the go-to platform for managing and scaling applications. One of the key features that make Kubernetes so powerful is its ability to intelligently schedule pods across nodes in a cluster. Node affinity is a crucial concept in this scheduling process, allowing developers to influence where pods are placed based on node characteristics.

How Can AI Revolutionize Your Development Workflow? An Introduction to Pieces and Civo

Join us as we dive into the world of AI integration with a live demo of Pieces and Civo. In this walkthrough, we explore how Pieces can revolutionize your development workflow, from automating manual tasks to enhancing code snippets with AI. Learn about on-device and cloud capabilities, and discover how AI can deeply enrich your coding experience.

Mastering Community Building with Jono Bacon Insights from a 26 Year Expert!

Join Jono Bacon, CEO and Founder of The Community Leadership Core, as he shares his journey from the early days of open source to leading large-scale communities at companies like Canonical, XPRIZE, and GitHub. Discover key insights on building and sustaining thriving communities, the challenges of maintaining open-source projects, and the evolution of community platforms like Slack and Discord. Find out more about Jono Bacon and The Community Leadership Core.

Understanding the Essentials of Software Testing: A Comprehensive Guide

Software testing plays a crucial role in ensuring that applications function correctly and meet user expectations. In this blog, we will explore the fundamental aspects of software testing, including its importance, types, and the lifecycle phases involved.

Optimise your ML workloads on Kubernetes

Kubernetes has proven to be a vital tool for developing and running ML models. It enhances experimentation, workflow management, and ensures high availability while handling the resource-intensive nature of AI workloads. With optimizations, Kubernetes can further improve resource utilization, making AI/ML projects more efficient.

Join Ken on SMC Journal - Scaling Kubernetes, Microservices, and Ephemeral Environments

Check out Ken Ahrens and Scott Moore as they discuss some blockers of developer productivity when building in Kubernetes, and how removing environment and data challenges can reduce toil and frustration! You can catch the full podcast on Scott’s page here: Scott Moore: Hey everybody out there in internet meme land. It’s time to hide your kids and hide your wife because it’s time for the SMC Journal podcast. Some of you will get that joke. Others will not.

Installing Karpenter: Lessons Learned From Our Experience

This article shares our experience migrating from the AWS Cluster Auto Scaler to Karpenter. We provide an overview of the steps we took to install Karpenter. This article is the first in a series dedicated to Karpenter. In future posts, we will cover other aspects of using Karpenter.

Everything you need to know about Large AI Model Training

When looking back at the role artificial intelligence (AI) has played in revolutionizing different industries that would typically require human intelligence, it is important to consider the next steps in this journey and how it is starting to evolve. With the growth of the industry, the volume and complexity of data are becoming unmanageable for pre-existing AI models.

Rightsizing & Handling Resource Allocation in Kubernetes

Handling resource allocation within Kubernetes clusters is of paramount importance. Proper resource allocation in Kubernetes ensures optimal performance and efficient utilization of the underlying infrastructure, safeguarding against capacity issues and application downtime. In contrast, improper resource allocation can lead to a plethora of challenges, from wasted resources to compromised application performance.

The Cost of Cloud 2024: Rising Prices, Challenges, and Sustainable Solutions

In 2024, the cloud computing landscape faces significant challenges as costs and complexities rise. Our latest report, The Cost of Cloud 2024, explores these issues, focusing on the dominance of Azure, AWS, and GCP, and offers strategies for navigating this evolving landscape.

What's New in Kubernetes 1.31: Elli

Kubernetes 1.31, also refered to as 'Elli', is the latest release from the Kubernetes project, introduces several significant updates that enhance the orchestration capabilities of the platform. This release continues the trend of evolving Kubernetes into a more robust, scalable, and secure system for managing containerized applications across diverse environments. Below, we delve into the key updates in Kubernetes 1.31. Kubernetes v1.31 will be available through on Civo shortly.

5 Best SOC 2 Compliance Solutions in 2024

SOC 2 compliance is crucial for any company handling sensitive customer data, but the process can be a headache. From managing your infrastructure to rigorous audits and ongoing monitoring, staying compliant demands a lot of time and effort. Thankfully, SOC 2 automation tools can make this process much smoother and faster. In this article, I’ll walk you through five top SOC 2 automation tools that can help you get and stay compliant with less stress.

Cut Cloud Infrastructure Costs By 5x - Guide For Startups

Managing costs while scaling operations is a challenging balancing act. One significant cost center is cloud infrastructure and its maintenance. This article aims to provide CTOs, VPs, and Head of Engineering with insights on optimizing these expenses. It highlights the benefits of leveraging DevOps Automation Platforms like Qovery to cut up to 5x their Cloud infrastructure costs.

The 6 Best GitOps Tools for Developers

GitOps is a game-changer for managing infrastructure and deployments using Git as the single source of truth. It makes DevOps processes more efficient, reliable, and traceable. For developers and organizations, GitOps not only speeds up development but also improves security and compliance. Today, I’ll break down what GitOps is, why it’s important, and review some top GitOps tools to help you on your journey.

Rancher Live: openEuler x Uyuni

Uyuni is a fully open source configuration and infrastructure management tool for Linux that helps you easily manage and update server estates. It is also the upstream project from which SUSE Manager (SUMA) is derived. Earlier this year, the project introduced support for openEuler, the popular open-source Linux distribution platform. Join us on this Rancher Live episode with Zhenyu Zheng, community operations manager and maintainer of several special interest groups within the openEuler project, to learn more about the project & its collaboration with Uyuni.

Why OpenStack is the Best Solution for Your Cloud Strategy | Open Source Cloud Computing

Operating in the cloud has become the norm in today's business world. However, depending solely on public clouds can introduce several challenges such as increased costs, privacy issues, and performance limitations. Enter OpenStack, the world's leading open-source cloud platform. OpenStack empowers you to create your own cloud infrastructure, giving you control over your digital future.

Observe deleted Kubernetes components in Grafana Cloud to boost troubleshooting and resource management

As a site reliability engineer, you need constant vigilance and a keen eye for detail if you want to manage your Kubernetes infrastructure effectively. As part of that effort, you need to see the historical data from your pods, nodes, and clusters — even after they’ve been deleted or recreated. Many SREs rely on kubectl for this, and while it’s indispensable for real-time Kubernetes management, it presents some significant challenges with historical data.

Crafting User-Friendly Solutions: Our Step-by-Step Design Process

Creating user-friendly solutions is crucial as it enhances the overall user experience and increases customer engagement. By making products easier to use and navigate, we ensure that users are more satisfied and likely to continue using them. At Qovery, we continuously deliver new features to enhance the developer experience. In this article, I will present our design process.

DevOps Automation: What is it and How to apply it?

DevOps automation is essential for businesses aiming to accelerate software delivery, improve quality, and enhance operational efficiency. By automating repetitive tasks and integrating tools across the development and operations lifecycle, organizations can achieve significant gains in productivity and agility. So let's discuss DevOps automation in detail, exploring its benefits, tools, processes, best practices, and commonly asked questions.

Platform Engineering: What is it and how it can empower developers

If you’ve heard of DevOps, then you have probably heard of the term ‘platform engineering’ before. Over time, platform engineering has become a hot topic that we love to hate. While it promises faster release cycles and developer empowerment through self-service, not everyone buys into this concept.

Guide to Monitoring Kubernetes Using a Telegraf Daemonset

Kubernetes is used in production-level applications and software services to automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications - ensuring high availability and consistent performance across distributed systems. It enhances reliability through features like load balancing, self-healing, and rolling updates, enabling efficient resource utilization and orchestration in cloud-native and hybrid environments.

#030 - Kubernetes for Humans with Ellen Chisa (Boldstart Ventures)

Ellen is a Partner at boldstart. She joined the boldstart team in January 2021, after having worked with the team as a founder at Dark. Her role allows her to do exactly what she loves – investing and supporting founders building pre-product, dev-focused, enterprise companies. Prior to boldstart and founding Dark, she worked in a variety of early stage product roles: at Lola on travel tooling, at Kickstarter on backer-facing projects, and at Microsoft on the first versions of cross-platform Office Mobile. The common thread is building tools that enable people to do creative work.

Do You Still Need a DevOps Team in 2024?

In the early days of DevOps, building and maintaining infrastructure required a specialized team. DevOps engineers were essential for ensuring smooth development operations and bridging the gap between development and IT operations. Today, however, with mature markets and advanced tools becoming standard, the necessity of a dedicated DevOps team is being re-evaluated.

What is Multi-Cloud, and why should you care?

As companies embrace cloud-native architectures and scale their operations, ensuring business continuity and minimizing downtime become paramount; even brief outages can result in substantial revenue loss and reputational damage. In July 2023, a flaw in CrowdStrike's software update caused widespread disruption across various industries. The air travel sector was particularly hard hit, with over 3,300 flights cancelled globally. Major airlines like United, Delta, American Airlines, British Airway.

Announcing the Cycle Toolbox

Today we announce the launch of the Cycle Toolbox, a suite of tools that are designed to streamline the workflows of Devops professionals and developers. Our goal is to create a toolkit that not only simplifies your daily tasks but also helps alleviate some of those common frustrations. This is just the beginning, but for our initial release, we're excited to introduce the following tools.

DevOps Checklist for Startups

This checklist is here to help startups evaluate and improve their DevOps practices. Based on our experience with over 200 startup customers, it’s tailored for teams with little or no dedicated DevOps staff. The aim is to highlight areas where you can make improvements, not to point out failures. Use this list to measure where you are now and to plan for future progress, ensuring your startup can grow smoothly and effectively.

Our migration from Kubernetes Built-in NLB to ALB Controller

Working with Kubernetes Services is convenient, especially when you can deploy Load Balancers via cloud providers like AWS. At Qovery, we initially started with Kubernetes’ built-in Network Load Balancer (NLB). However, we decided to move to the AWS Load Balancer Controller (ALB Controller). In this article, I explain why we made this switch and how it benefits our infrastructure.

Kubernetes Security: The Essential Role of Guardrails

In today’s rapidly evolving technology landscape, Kubernetes has become essential for deploying and managing containerized applications. As organizations increasingly rely on Kubernetes to scale their operations, the need for robust guardrails becomes paramount. In this context, guardrails refer to the policies and mechanisms that ensure the safe and efficient operation of Kubernetes environments.

The Secret To Blazing Fast Docker Builds

It's not an understatement to say Dockerfiles are the underpinning of modern DevOps. Writing a simple Dockerfile that 'works' is relatively straightforward, but there are several tricks and tips that could significantly improve the build speed and efficiency of your container images. If your current Dockerfiles copy in multi gigabyte contexts, reinstall dependencies on every build, or use only a single stage, we need to talk.