This week, the world stopped for a few hours as Google users experienced an outage on a massive scale. The outage affected ALL services which require Google account authentication. This includes the Google Cloud Platform (Cloud Console, Cloud Storage, BigQuery, etc.), Google Workspace (Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Drive, etc.) and Google Classroom. With the myriad of affected platforms, this particular outage was far from passing by unnoticed by users.

Bitbucket Pipelines now allows steps with a manual trigger to be used in parallel groups, satisfying one of the highest voted feature requests. This feature provides more flexibility in Pipelines, allowing teams to configure pipelines with multiple options and then only run the steps they actually need to run, at the time they want. For example you can choose which environments should be deployed for individual developers, giving them different environments to test and do their work.

Today, I am excited to announce project Harvester, open source hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software built using Kubernetes. Harvester provides fully integrated virtualization and storage capabilities on bare-metal servers. No Kubernetes knowledge is required to use Harvester. In the past few years, we’ve seen many attempts to bring VM management into container platforms, including our own RancherVM, and other solutions like KubeVirt and Virtlet.

Every Rails app has a breaking point; a level of activity that it simply cannot handle. Your braking point depends on big architectural decisions, yes — and also on the tiniest changes committed by your most junior developer. That's why it's vital to regularly test your application's performance under load. In this article, Milap Neupane gives us a Rails-centric introduction to load testing with a powerful open-source tool called JMeter.

Prometheus is an essential element in DevOps. It has one of the largest contributor communities in the open source world and is the favorite database for time-series metrics data. It is also part of Logz.io’s complete observability package, which integrates open source grafana, Jaeger, and ELK Stack into one platform. It’s a favorite for system and container monitoring. This tutorial will show you how Prometheus works with Docker and your local machine.

Mattermost v5.30 is generally available today; the release includes the following new features: Enterprise Edition All Editions

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a naming system for computers, services, or other resources connected to the Internet or a private network. DNS translates domain names to the numerical IP addresses needed for locating and identifying computer services and devices. For decades It’s been an essential component of the Internet. It’s an essential part of Kubernetes as well, and is used to determine how workloads connect to Kubernetes services as well as resources outside the cluster.

In this week’s tech tip, we are going to show you how to set up an integration with the instant messaging and collaboration app, Slack. These days, collaboration tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams are indispensable to the distributed workforce. In addition to being an instant messaging system that lets you bypass email, Slack has lots of add-ins for other workplace tools.

Today we’re happy to announce the general availability of Icinga Director v1.8! This release focuses on improvements of monitoring automation tasks within the director and enhancements for delegating specific tasks to your teammates.

Digital initiatives are on the rise, with spending on the public cloud expected to increase by 18% in 2021. These initiatives are also driving customer service teams towards operational excellence with a focus on customer advocacy and engagement. As more companies embrace the cloud and digital-first operating models, customer service organizations are finding they need to be more proactive in order to create great customer experiences.