Many of the available configuration management tools, such as Ansible, Terraform, Puppet, Chef, and Saltstack provide automation for infrastructure, cloud, compliance and security management, and integration for deployment and continuous deployment (CI / CD). But what is the best tool to start automating your particular environment? The difficult task of evaluating Configuration Management Tools prevents DevOps from evolving technically and proposing improvements to the environment they manage.

If you’re in enterprise IT, you’ve probably already looked into Microsoft’s Azure public cloud. Microsoft Azure offers excellent enterprise-grade features and tightly integrates with Office 365 and Active Directory. It also provides a managed Kubernetes service, AKS, that you can provision from the Azure portal.

While Kubernetes has been traditionally used with Linux workloads, the desire to run Windows applications is an important need for many organizations that have critical applications running on Windows Server. Docker has already offered support for native Windows containers, so the next missing piece would be Windows node support in Kubernetes clusters. Google Cloud has recognized this gap and is now offering Windows support for Kubernetes clusters.

One of the most critical metrics when it comes to the software delivery process is deployment frequency, which measures how often releases are happening in production. While in theory all organizations should strive to deploy as often as possible, in practice the benefits for frequent deployments are often overlooked or buried under endless technical debates.

In person, you can easily tell someone’s mood based on their body language and how they speak, but that’s much more difficult with text alone. Emojis are a great way to add tone to a piece of text and also help make text-based conversation feel more casual, relaxed, and fun. Thanks to emojis, we can chat with much more real emotion than you might get by being careful about your word choice or by including just the right number of exclamation marks and periods at the end of a sentence.

In IT environments, all software applications and systems produce logs with varying levels of details or context about different events. These log files are automatically generated, and you can see them as a time-stamped record of events. Traditionally, organizations maintained logs locally or in a self-hosted setup. This was done primarily to meet various compliance mandates.

In agile development, planning, coding, and builds are an ongoing loop. But when a circle is broken, you can’t travel it at full speed. For users of Atlassian Bitbucket Server and Jira, JFrog’s integrations can help Artifactory bridge the gaps for continuous velocity. In a previous blog post, we discussed how to provide Jira information as a critical “why” in your build information.

History books will one day write about our time. What will they say? Worldwide pandemic caused governments to issue stay-at-home orders in 2020. People were advised to wear masks in public and keep six feet of distance. Rice, toilet paper, and household cleaners were impossible to find. It has been a major adjustment for everyone, to be sure. From the restaurant owners trying not to lose their businesses to the homeschooling parents trying not to lose their minds, we're all facing unique challenges.

If you’ve done your research, you probably know that Kubernetes is only one piece of the puzzle. Production grade deployments require a lot of moving pieces including logging and monitoring, governance, and more. You’ll also need some key extensions — some Kubernetes can’t go without, others that will make your life a lot easier. Let’s take a closer look.

In most of our blogs, we spend a TON of time going on about protecting our endpoints, looking at sysmon, checking the firewall, correlating IDS data and the like… Today, we're going to shift gears a bit and look at security from a different angle. Recently, there has been a tremendous focus on the shifting paradigm of a workforce that primarily resides in corporate offices, to a highly virtual workforce sitting at their kitchen tables.