Talk about performance monitoring to any system admin or IT manager and one of the first questions they will ask is whether the monitoring is agent-based or agentless. The moment you hear that question, you know that they are interested in an agentless monitoring solution. Such is the fear of having agents on critical servers in the infrastructure! In this article, we will discuss.

Edge computing – with its ability to help unleash the potential of smart cities and autonomous vehicles, is something often thought to exist “around the corner” as opposed to an industry already in motion.

This is a review of the last three years that we spent stabilizing Marathon. Marathon is the central workload scheduler in DC/OS. Most of the time when you launch an app or a service on DC/OS, it is Marathon that starts it on top of Apache Mesos. Mesos manages the compute and storage resources and Marathon orchestrates the workload. We sometimes dub it the “init.d of DC/OS”. Being such an integral part of DC/OS, we must ensure that it keeps functioning.

When was the last time you had the chance to listen to some of the most beautiful concerts that nature can play for you? From simple chirps and tweets to complex bird songs composed into a sophisticated soundscape, you may wish you could decrypt and understand their daily conversation. “Hey, good morning, how are you today?”, you might hear in the early hours, sometimes so loudly that you are awakened from the chirping.

This is part of a series of articles discussing strategies to implement serverless architectural design patterns. We continue to follow this literature review. Although we use AWS serverless services to illustrate concepts, they can be applied in different cloud providers. In the previous article (Part 1) we covered the Aggregator and Data Lake patterns. In today’s article, we’ll continue in the Orchestration & Aggregation category covering the Fan-in/Fan-out and Queue-based load leveling.

Technology has a way of circling around to the same ideas over time, but with different approaches that learn from previous iterations. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Microservices Architecture (MSA) are such evolutionary approaches. Where lessons learned made sense, they were reused; and where painful lessons were learned, new methods and ideas were introduced.

It’s been shown that if you follow a proven collection of practices for developing, designing, testing, implementing, and maintaining your software, you will produce a much higher quality product. Over the past few years, we have seen an increasing number of cases of attacks on the application layer. The Open Web Application Security Project, OWASP, estimates that around one-third of web applications contain security vulnerabilities.

The Internet has enabled a level of collaboration like never before in history. With just a few mouse clicks, you can see other people on the other side of the world and work with them remotely on whatever you want. Remote work is becoming new normal in many organizations. Managing teams remotely sometimes even in different time zones, with poor communication, monitoring becomes complex, and team misalignment is paramount.

Accessing Windows registry (local or remote) is a typical way of gathering useful data. However, there’s a typical pitfall that can cause unexpected scripts or programs behavior. Namely, accessing registry values across different architectures (say, 64-bit entries from 32-bit applications).

Isn’t all logging pretty much the same? Logs appear by default, like magic, without any further intervention by teams other than simply starting a system… right? While logging may seem like simple magic, there’s a lot to consider. Logs don’t just automatically appear for all levels of your architecture, and any logs that do automatically appear probably don’t have all of the details that you need to successfully understand what a system is doing.