Phishing happens. It is probably happening as you read this. Right now, some well-defended company is having data under its care exposed. This data may contain sensitive information, such as login credentials, and in many cases, it is only known that an attack of this type has taken place after the fact. Protecting yourself and your employer against phishing attacks relies foremost on critical thinking; however, there are some business processes and technologies that can help.

To quote the timeless Ren and Stimpy jingle, “everyone needs a log.” It’s true — everyone does need a log, especially developers. Despite the fact that no developer looks forward to combing through logs, they’re incredibly useful when unexpected performance issues, like one we recently had with file uploads, need some investigation.

Etcd is an open-source distributed key-value store created by the CoreOS team, now managed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It is pronounced “et-cee-dee”, making reference to distributing the Unix “/etc” directory, where most global configuration files live, across multiple machines. It serves as the backbone of many distributed systems, providing a reliable way for storing data across a cluster of servers.

One of the key Kubernetes security concepts is that workload identity is tied back to information that the orchestrator has. The orchestrator is actually the authoritative entity for what the actual workloads are in the platform. Kubernetes uses labels to select objects and to identify collections of objects that satisfy certain conditions. We, and others in the Kubernetes networking space, often talk about using Kubernetes ‘labels’ as identity bearers.

As main event in this new Pandora FMS 731 update package we have the improvement of IP address management, better known as IPAM. Also, VLAN management, Supergrids and integration with Microsoft DHCP Server, are now included. It is possible as well to monitor the use of networks with alerts, graphs and reports.

Unfortunately, Microsoft and Office 365 suffered their second major outage of the year and this one was even bigger than the first. We say “unfortunately” because even though our business is to help monitor cloud and SaaS services and our business goes up when there are problems, we don’t wish an outage on any cloud provider. Operating a SaaS business at the scale of Microsoft Office 365 is a herculean task and that’s why they get paid the big bucks.

Uptime.com includes several advanced check options to provide the flexibility organizations need in creating a response plan to downtime. Maintenance and planned downtime for patches and updates don’t typically create severe downtime events. With escalations, teams have an automated alert system that contacts designated senior-level personnel with relevant technical data.

We’ve wrapped up the fourth quarter and 2018 on a high note! We’ve completed the fourth quarter of 2018 with a 33% increase over the fourth quarter of 2017, and the year 2018 finished 30% over 2017’s totals.

Microsoft Azure has long proven it’s a force to consider in the world of cloud computing. Over the past year, Azure has made some significant steps in bridging the gap with AWS by offering new services and capabilities as well as competitive pricing.

So a while back I got an email from our finance team. I was tasked to assist with tagging resources in our AWS infrastructure and investigate which items are contributing to certain costs. I don’t know about other engineers, but these kinds of tasks are on the same realm of fun as … wiping bird poop off your windshield at a gas station. So I did the sanest thing I could think of.