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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.

Get a Great Developer Experience with GitHub Actions and Shipa

As a software engineer, leveraging GitHub is one of those tools that transcend your personal and professional development activities. Bringing open source to the masses, GitHub is a familiar platform for many. A newer addition to the GitHub Platform is GitHub Actions which was originally a workflow engine, now expanding into CI/CD.

CIS benchmark compliance: Introducing the Ubuntu Security Guide

The CIS benchmark has hundreds of configuration recommendations, so hardening and auditing a Linux system manually can be very tedious. Every administrator of systems that need to comply with that benchmark would wish that this process is easily usable and automatable. Why is that? Manual configuration of such a large number of rules leads to mistakes – mistakes that cause not only functional problems, but may also cause security breaches.

Ubuntu introduces the Ubuntu Security Guide to ease DISA-STIG compliance

January 17th: London, UK – Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, the world’s most popular operating system across private and public clouds, now offers the Ubuntu Security Guide tooling for compliance with the DISA Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG) in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. The new automated tooling builds on Canonical’s track record of designing Ubuntu for high security and regulated workloads, powering U.S. government agencies, prime contractors, and service providers.

DevOps State of Mind Episode 7: How AI and ML Can Empower Your Developers

Nick Durkin is the Field CTO and VP of Field Engineering at Harness, where he focuses on solving the technical challenges that are standing in the way of true innovation. Today, we're talking about how Harness uses AI and ML to remove the most annoying parts of your job so that you can focus on what you do best.

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.