Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Top tips is a weekly column where we highlight what’s trending in the tech world and share ways to stay ahead. This week, we’re focusing on simple strategies to make software updates and patch management more efficient.

When the network is down, everything grinds to a halt—sales calls, SaaS log-ins, factory robots, even patient monitors. That blunt truth is pushing connectivity from an IT afterthought to a board-level mandate, according to the new C1 Edge 2025 Network Modernization Benchmark Report. The C1 Edge research—conducted in partnership with Hanover Research—surveyed 175 U.S. IT and business leaders who buy and run enterprise networks across multiple industries.

VMware. A name synonymous with virtualization, a powerhouse in the infrastructure space and seemingly the enterprise standard for those managing VMs, to put it simply. But if you haven't noticed yet, behind that familiar name is a new age of license complexity, unexpected renewals, and sharp price hikes that have left many organizations scrambling. Since Broadcom acquired VMware, these challenges have only intensified, with customers blindsided by costs increasing several hundred percent overnight.

Here at Canonical we are excited to announce that we have shipped the first release of our solution for enterprise-ready data lakehouses, built on the combination of Apache Spark and Apache Kyuubi. Using our Charmed Apache Kyuubi in integration with Spark, you can deliver a robust, production-level, and open source data lakehouse. Our Apache Kyuubi charm integrates tightly as part of the Charmed Apache Spark bundle, providing a single and simpler-to-use SQL interface to big data analytics enthusiasts.

Since its launch in 2020, the Infinity data source for Grafana has become the go-to solution to seamlessly query and visualize data from JSON, CSV, XML, and GraphQL endpoints within Grafana. Allowing users to integrate diverse data formats via HTTP-based APIs, the Infinity data source has enabled a wide range of use cases within our community over the years — from visualizing cloud computing costs to popular Pokémon games.

As cloud infrastructure becomes more dynamic and distributed, DevOps and security teams need to quickly detect risks and understand their context: where those risks live, how critical they are, and how to respond effectively. By surfacing misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, sensitive data risks, and identity threats directly on a real-time diagram of your infrastructure, Cloudcraft helps teams identify, prioritize, and remediate security issues at scale.

Understand how Kafka integrates with Apache Iceberg and experiment locally with Docker and Spark The streaming data landscape is evolving rapidly, and one of the most exciting developments is the integration between Apache Kafka and Apache Iceberg. While Kafka excels at real-time data streaming, organizations often struggle with the complexity of moving streaming data into analytical systems.

Speed vs security has long been treated as an impossible choice: move fast and risk instability, or stay safe and fall behind. For DevOps, DevSecOps, and Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) leaders, that tension often plays out between the demand to ship updates quickly and the need to maintain airtight security and compliance.