Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Since its founding 20 years ago, CyrusOne has grown to be the third largest datacenter provider in the US, serving more than 200 Fortune 1000 customers worldwide. We haven’t reached this level of success by resting—we’re always on the lookout for better ways to serve our customers and new technologies to stay ahead of the game. That’s why one of our recent initiatives was IT automation.

I am a big proponent of cross-functional alignment, as I remnded our ELT at a recent off-site meeting. There’s a lot of buzz about FinOps bringing financial accountability to cloud spend by eliminating procurement siloes and implementing cross-functional best practices. As the CFO of a SaaS company, I fully support this practice. In fact, Virtana recently made some changes to our cloud infrastructure as part of our own evolution.

Back in 2018, AWS first released its Graviton processor—their custom-built 64-bit Arm processor—and followed that with the release of Graviton2 processors just a year later. Now customers running ECS and EKS on EC2 can choose between X86 and ARM64 depending on which processor best fits their application workload.

If you’re responsible for a significant number of Windows servers, you already understand the importance of being aware of the health and security of your environment. Unfortunately, you’re probably also aware of the tremendous amount of effort and resources required to monitor your Windows environment. Let’s take a look into why and how you should be closely monitoring your Windows server environments from a security perspective.

Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources without direct active management by the user. Instead, the delivery of said resources is available over the internet, which has made cloud computing a popular digital service that various industries use to operate and manage work tasks. How cloud computing services are implemented, hosted and accessed by users is called cloud deployment. There are different types of deployments, each with defined advantages for users.

This is the second blog post (part 1 available here) where we look at the history of open source identity management. This post focuses on Oauth and OpenID, the protocols currently used in modern applications and services. This post does not cover the technical details of the open source identity management standards, which are explained very well in this Okta blog post. Rather, it explains the origins of Oauth and OpenID, and provides insights on the context that led to their creation.

In August 2016, the United States government announced a new federal source-code policy, which mandates that at least 20% of custom source code developed by or for any agency of the federal government must be released as open-source software (OSS). The memo of this policy also states that the Federal Government spends more than $6 billion each year on software through more than 42,000 transactions. Obviously, this is a huge business for all open-source developers.

Congratulations, you’ve been tasked with moving your workload to somebody else’s building! The “cloud” is just that: someone else’s data center. But their data center is pretty impressive (so there’s that). And, yes, while there are a million options available to you in AWS and Azure…a plethora of IT goodies, most of us will not use any of those bells and whistles, at least initially. We have to get there first—your basic lift and shift.

Let’s say you are writing a shell script for a systems housekeeping task. Perhaps the script is uploading backups to a remote server, or it is cleaning up old data, or it is making a measurement and submitting it to a somebody else’s HTTP API. What is the least cumbersome way for the script to contact you in case of problems? Let’s say you want to be contacted via email – how to make it work?