Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Vulnerabilities are part and parcel of the software development life cycle. If left untreated, they can expose your application to malicious attacks, which can be detrimental to its functioning and reliability. To avoid severe damage and complications that arise from having the vulnerabilities exposed, it is good practice to set up a vulnerability management system. Vulnerability management is a practice that teams should integrate into the larger development process as it helps keep the software secure.

Mend is an automated vulnerability scanning tool that helps teams detect and resolve issues quickly. Mend can discover outdated packages and tell you if you’re relying on tools with known issues. Then, through automated remediation, Mend creates pull requests for developers with specific guidance on resolving those issues. Mend conducts static code analysis as well as package and dependency management analysis to identify weaknesses.

Cortex is a developer portal that helps engineering teams create a culture of reliability and ownership. Its service and resource catalogs provide a single-pane-of-glass into critical information about their ownership, documentation, dependencies and third party integration data.

Imagine you’re part of a software development team that’s working on an important new project. Everyone is excited about the work, but you’re running into trouble. The work wasn’t clearly divided up, so some of the engineers unintentionally did overlapping work. Meanwhile, neither the PM nor the engineers realized that they would eventually need sign-off from an external stakeholder, who doesn’t agree with all of the project requirements.

For software development teams to make meaningful progress, they must invest in efficient monitoring, reporting practices, and tooling. This is because only by keeping track of select metrics, such as those pertaining to application performance, will you know whether you are on the right track. Without knowledge of whether the software is functioning and performing as it is supposed to, there is no way of knowing what, if any, changes need to be made.

The software development life cycle is by no means a short or easy process. From project design to post-production monitoring, each stage of the life cycle comes with its own set of workflow-related demands. Teams must develop adaptable yet agile workflows to prioritize efficiency while simultaneously ensuring a positive developer experience. Thankfully, there is no shortage of tools to boost productivity in software development team workflows.

Microservices architecture is the new norm for building products these days. An application made up of hundreds of independent services enables teams to work independently and accelerate development. However, such highly distributed applications are also harder to monitor. When hundreds of services are traversed to satisfy a single request, it becomes difficult to investigate system issues.

Developers need all the information they can get on APIs to get them to work in alignment with their vision. There is no dearth of knowledge in the software development industry today, but only when that knowledge is documented well is it of use to others. In the context of APIs, developer portals offer an effective way to document and communicate relevant information. In this article, we answer the following questions about developer API portals.

Microservices are being used every where and for good reasons. They do provide you with many benefits especially improved focus and cutting the time to market. Microservices do bring complexities too. Monitoring microservices is complex because of simply the number of them. Monitoring a user transaction requires monitoring many microservices. Correlating the data from them to identify the root cause manually is a nightmare especially in a complex environment with 100s or 1000s of microservices.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2022 kicks off next week (October 24-28 in Detroit), so we’ve been thinking a lot about how service catalogs can help you get the most out of your Kubernetes clusters!