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The Twistlock Acquisition: An Analysis of Palo Alto Networks' strategy

Congratulations Twistlock! One of the best signs of an emerging market is when existing, massive players are willing to put hundreds of millions of dollars on the line to get into that market right now. Given today’s Twistlock acquisition by Palo Alto Networks, and other recent acquisitions like Heptio/VMware, we believe this is happening in the cloud-native market. Congratulations to Twistlock on their success.

How To Manage Kubernetes with Kubectl

The mechanism for interacting with Kubernetes on a daily basis is typically through a command line tool called kubectl. kubectl is primarily used to communicate with Kubernetes API servers to create, update, delete workloads within Kubernetes. The objective of this tutorial is to provide an overview of some of the common commands that you can utilise, as well as provide a good starting point in managing Kubernetes.

Docker and Kubernetes in high security environments

Container orchestration and cloud-native computing has gained lots of traction the recent years. The adoption has increased to such level that even enterprises in finance, banking and the public sector are interested. Compared to other businesses they differ by having extensive requirements on information security and IT security. One important aspect is how containers could be used in production environments while maintaining system separation between applications.

How I decimated Postgres response times for my SaaS

Last week I rolled out a simple patch that decimated the response time of a Postgres query crucial to Checkly. It quite literally went from an average of ~100ms with peaks to 1 second to a steady 1ms to 10ms. However, that patch was just the last step of a longer journey. This post details those steps and all the stuff I learned along the way. We'll look at how I analyzed performance issues, tested fixes and how simple Postgres optimizations can have spectacular results.

Codemania 2019: What we learned from global tech leaders

For eight years, Codemania has brought developers and technology enthusiasts together in Auckland. This year, 500 developers arrived to network, share ideas, and solve problems with an impressive speaker lineup that included developers, authors, and global tech leaders. As the day unfolded, we learned how Apple appears to achieve the impossible with their short product development lifecycles.

NiCE VMware Management Pack 5.10 released

The NiCE VMware Management Pack delivers first-rate monitoring for your business critical, highly dynamical virtualized environments. Taming the beast of VMware service outages has never been easier. Leverage your existing investment, reduce costs, save time and build efficiencies that will last beyond your expectations.

An Elasticsearch Tutorial: Getting Started

Elasticsearch is the living heart of what is today’s the most popular log analytics platform — the ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana). The role played by Elasticsearch is so central that it has become synonymous with the name of the stack itself. Used primarily for search and log analysis, Elasticsearch is today one of the most popular database systems available today.

CVE-2019-9929 - internal authentication secrets leaked in logs

The CFEngine engineering team has recently discovered a severe security issue in the CFEngine Enterprise product. CFEngine is using some internal secrets for authentication to the Mission Portal API and the PostgreSQL database when running background maintenance tasks. These internal secrets are randomly generated during the installation process and stored in files which only the root user has access to.

Deploying a Private Docker Registry to Cycle

Secure access to your own private registry helps control who has access to your images. Compared to usage-based services such as Docker Hub and Quay, a Cycle hosted private registry only consumes the resources you give it access to, yielding a more cost-effective deployment. Let’s take a look at how simple it is to deploy a private Docker registry on Cycle.

Cost: A New Critical Metric for DevOps

DevOps is a very data-driven practice. After the right cultural changes take place within an organization to adopt DevOps, teams often rely heavily on monitoring, measurement, and continuous improvement to keep their projects on track. The best teams use KPIs to benchmark their performance and report up to management. However, there’s one metric your DevOps team might not be tracking: The cloud cost of their engineering decisions.