The Rancher Academy launched on May 15, 2020. Here we are, 94 days later, and we’ve issued our 1,000th certificate to a graduate of the Certified Rancher Operator: Level 1 course. Rancher is open source software, so anyone can download it and use it. With that freedom, though, comes a cost: we all learn how to use it according to how we need to use it. Through this lens, the actual potential of Rancher becomes distorted, and the experience of each individual varies widely.

August 3rd, 2015 was the date of the first commit in the internal Jaeger repository at Uber. Technically, the true birthday of the project was probably a week or so earlier, because while I was prototyping the collector service we went through a number of project names, some of them rather embarrassing to name here, and the real first commits happened in a differently named repository.

We’ve all been on two types of projects: ones that ran smoothly, and ones that crumbled to pieces. While there are lots of contributing factors in each case, I’ll go out on a limb and say that project ownership (or lack thereof) is what makes the biggest difference.

One question I get asked frequently is “how can I get deeper insight and audit correlation searches running inside my environment?” The first step in understanding our correlation searches, is creating a baseline of what is expected and identify what is currently enabled and running today. Content Management inside Splunk Enterprise Security is a quick way to filter on what is enabled (and it’s built into the UI and works out of the box).

For baseball pitchers, the two most glorious words in the English language are “perfect game.” For actors, it’s “Oscar win” (forget all that nonsense about how “it’s an honor just to be nominated.”). For school-aged kids, it’s “snow day.” And for businesses, of course, it’s “captive audience.” Indeed, it doesn’t matter how compelling or clever a marketing and advertising campaign might be.

Kubernetes as a project is maturing, support has been increased from nine to 12 months, and there’s a new protocol in place to ensure a steady progress on feature development. Also, many of its new features are meant to improve the quality of life of its users, like Generic ephemeral inline volumes, or the structured logging.

In Elasticsearch 7.9, we’ll be introducing a new “wildcard” field type optimised for quickly finding patterns inside string values. This new field type addresses best practices for efficiently indexing and searching within logs and security data by taking a whole new approach to how we index string data. Depending on your existing field usage, wildcards can provide: The most exciting feature of this new data type is its simplification of partial matches.

When was the last time an IT conversation reminded you of the movie “Casablanca”? That happened to me recently when I was talking with another IT professional about Ivanti Neurons. We discussed how Ivanti Neurons will make life easier for IT by delivering more self-servicing, self-healing and self-securing experiences.

Pop quiz, hotshot. How much does it cost to build a self-hosted Kubernetes cluster? Quick, no conferring. If you thought the answer was “nothing”, go to the back of the class. According to distributed systems expert Cindy Sridharan, quoted in Cloud Native DevOps with Kubernetes, the answer is “one million dollars”: It takes well over a million dollars just in engineer salary to get Kubernetes up and running from scratch. And you still might not get there.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication on Container Security provides a comprehensive review of the major risks for core components of a container system. One of the most obvious objects of concern (alongside a host of other things to keep a good security professional up at night) is, of course, the containers running on your platform. Container security is obviously critical to your applications and data.