Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

4 ways to save on IT costs in the asset life cycle [Part 4: Retirement and disposal]

Welcome back to the final part of our four-part blog series on saving on IT costs in the asset life cycle. In the last part, we talked about how to cut costs during maintenance and support. In this part, we’ll look at retirement and disposal, and ways to save during this phase. The retirement phase of the asset life-cycle can be tricky, because asset managers have to accurately judge the time frame for when a certain asset is ready for retirement.

Celebrating issue 50 of Performance Matters

When we first launched Performance Matters a year ago, we didn’t just want to surface the performance stories of the big tech companies; our goal was to share and highlight the hard work of thousands of people making software faster. Since then, we’ve delivered over 550 articles, community ideas, tweets, videos, and the occasional comic strip from every corner of the web to your inbox. Here are the 10 most popular articles from all 50 issues of our weekly performance newsletter. Enjoy!

Observability in the Cloud-Native Age: Announcing the DevOps Pulse 2020

It’s that time of year again — the DevOps Pulse 2020 is here! Last year, nearly 1,000 engineers around the world provided their insights in the DevOps Pulse 2019 so we could get the community’s perspective on the growth and challenges associated with observability, cloud monitoring and more. As we discovered in last year’s DevOps Pulse, observability is still a major challenge for many organizations.

Monitoring IoT devices using heartbeats and MQTT gateways

When working with IoT (internet of things) devices one of the key issues is to keep track of the health of all installations. Most of the time, especially with smaller devices, the applications (firmwares) are flashed for a single time during setup and stay untouched at their location of action for a long while.

Multi-Cluster Vulnerability Scanning with Alcide and Rancher

Kubernetes provides the freedom to rapidly build and ship applications while dramatically minimizing deployment and service update cycles. However, the velocity of application deployment requires a new approach that involves integrating tools as early as possible in the deployment pipeline and inspecting the code and configuration against Kubernetes security best practices. Kubernetes has many security knobs that address various aspects required to harden the cluster and applications running inside.

How we're improving backfill methods to get older data into Prometheus

A few weeks ago, I teamed up with Bartek Plotka, a principal software engineer at Red Hat, for a deep-dive session on Prometheus at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU. We covered a lot of topics, with highlights that included scaling Prometheus, remote-write and metadata. We ended the talk with a quick demo on how to import data from CSV files into Prometheus. I want to use this blog post to provide more insight into the state of backfill in Prometheus.

Serverless vs. Containers: Key Differences Explained

The “as a service” business model continues to grow rapidly, largely thanks to the rise of cloud computing. “As a service” offerings deliver IT products and technologies such as software, hardware, and data storage to consumers via the Internet, rather than having to install or manage them themselves. Serverless and containers are two such “as a service” technologies that have seen increasing adoption in recent years.

What is AWS Amplify?

Amazon Web Services is the world’s biggest cloud platform, and businesses of all shapes and sizes use it every day to run their businesses. You may find this surprising, but AWS accounts for more than half of Amazon's operating income. Thus, Amazon has a vested interest in getting as many people to use AWS as possible, so it offers a whole bunch of tools to make it easy to use. AWS Amplify is one of these.