Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

I was asked to write a pledge to help promote the importance of Safer Internet Day, which is taking place February 8. If you are not familiar with Safer Internet Day, it is a day dedicated to highlighting practical ways in which you can be involved in creating and maintaining a better online world. You can read more about it here. I took on this task and actually came up with two pledges: a personal and business one.

Today, anyone can contribute to some of the world’s most important software platforms and frameworks, such as Kubernetes, the Linux kernel or Python. They can do this because these platforms are open source, meaning they are collaboratively developed by global communities. What if we applied the same principles of democratization and free access to cybersecurity?

Plugins can help teams unlock the full potential of Mattermost, but they aren’t always ready to go out of the box. Learn how Chimera streamlines plugin configuration via an OAuth2 Proxy. One of the best aspects of any software offered in the Cloud is the ability to start using it in just a matter of minutes. The same is true for the Mattermost Cloud offering.

Last year we had a look at managing local groups with the custom groups promise type. As you may or may not recall, we used JSON-strings to imitate CFEngine bodies. This was due to the fact that the promise module protocol did not support bodies at that time. Today, on the other hand, we’re happy to announce that as of CFEngine 3.20, this will no longer be the case. In this blog post we’ll introduce the long awaited feature; custom bodies.

It takes only a glance at the daily headlines to see that cybercriminals are using increasingly sophisticated methods to breach cloud defenses and access sensitive data. The complexity of cloud frameworks makes it extraordinarily difficult to detect nefarious activities. In many cases, attackers lurk in systems for weeks or months before pulling the trigger.

Securing modern-day production systems is expensive and complex. Teams often need to implement extensive measures, such as secure coding practices, security testing, periodic vulnerability scans and penetration tests, and protections at the network edge. Even when organizations have the resources to deploy these solutions, they still struggle to keep pace with software teams, especially as they accelerate their release cycles and migrate to distributed systems and microservices.

CFEngine and Ansible are two complementary infrastructure management tools. Findings from our analysis show that they can be combined and used side by side with joint forces to handle all areas in the best possible way. Part of infrastructure management is hosts deployment, either when building a brand new infrastructure or when growing one by adding new hosts.