The world is emerging from the largest global pandemic in a century. I, for one, am enjoying some very non-digital experiences as a result. Hugging a friend. Dining indoors at a restaurant. And I am not taking these things for granted the way I once did. But while we cautiously return to some old ways, certain habits are forever changed. Online shopping. Telehealth. Remote work. Fitness apps. The dust hasn't settled (and may never do so) on our new normal digital load.

Enterprise adoption of containers has surged. According to the 2020 CNCF survey, the number of organizations running in excess of 5,000 containers in production has more than doubled, to 23 percent from 11 percent in 2016. But in a world of rapidly scaling container usage, the container build systems that were designed to work well for individual developers tend to break down.

When did our infrastructure get so complicated? For many of my clients, the number of resources their applications are built on seems to have snowballed overnight. It was, of course, a gradual progression, and usually a conscious one, but complexity can feel like it grows geometrically with each new resource element. And that complexity can create problems.

The U.S. government is instituting stricter requirements on federal agencies and federal contractors to address cybersecurity threats. Adopting the right set of tools and practices will help organizations secure their software development supply chains and be prepared to meet these standards. However, the initial requirements also provide a valuable framework for any organization trying to reduce its security risk—not just government institutions and those doing business with them.

Last year, VMware Tanzu Mission Control introduced data protection capabilities to help enterprises safely and confidently run critical workloads on Kubernetes. With this unique feature, enterprises can centrally manage data protection on their clusters across multiple environments, easily backing up and restoring their Kubernetes clusters and namespaces.

For years, reports analyzing the evolution of the DevOps movement have been eagerly awaited by members of this growing global community. This research has helped establish benchmarks for DevOps adoption, identify best practices, and analyze DevOps outcomes—in other words, the results achieved by DevOps leaders vs. DevOps laggards. It’s interesting to see how the conversation around DevOps research has changed over the years.

People around the world have access to digital experiences in almost every part of their lives, all from the touch of a button. So it only makes sense that they also expect the same—if not better—seamless experience when it comes to how they engage with government organizations.

The way we architect and build applications has changed over the last decade or so. Where monoliths (or single, large codebases) used to be the standard, modern applications are now built using a combination of new architecture patterns, operational models, and software delivery services.

Manufacturing is more important than ever as governments, businesses, and individuals rely on the industry to drive innovation and economic prosperity through employment and exports, producing both essential and non-essential products that enhance our daily lives.

In microservices architecture, to identify performance issues—including latency—it’s important to monitor each service and all inter-service communication. Jaeger and VMware Tanzu Observability can help. Jaeger is an open source, distributed tracing system released by Uber Technologies. VMware Tanzu Observability is a high-performance streaming analytics platform that supports 3D observability (e.g., metrics, histograms, and traces/spans).