The Azure SQL Managed Instance is one of Microsoft’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings for SQL. It adds all the features you would expect of a PaaS platform such as automated patching, backups and streamlined high availability whilst closely aligning the technology to on-premises or IaaS workloads to reduce the barrier to entry. The product features near 100% compatibility with the latest Enterprise Edition of SQL Server and the automated Azure Data Migration service.

Slack recently had a no good very bad day in which some broken external monitoring contributed to a perfect storm. But one passage caught our eye: “After the incident was mitigated, the first question we asked ourselves was why our monitoring didn’t catch this problem. We had alerting in place for this precise situation, but unfortunately, it wasn’t working as intended.

Links are so fundamental to web development that they're almost invisible. When we link to a third-party page, we hardly ever consider how it could become an opportunity to exploit our users. In this article, Julien Cretel introduces us to three techniques that bad actors can use to target our users and discusses how to avoid them.

At Grafana Labs, we’re big fans of putting ourselves in the shoes of our customers. So when it comes to building a product, dogfooding is a term we throw around constantly. In short, what it means is that we actually use the products we create throughout their entire life cycle. And I really mean the whole life cycle.

In today’s post, we’ll look at two Elixir HTTP client libraries: Mint and Finch. Finch is built on top of Mint. We’ll see the benefits offered by this abstraction layer. We’ll also talk about some of the existing HTTP client libraries in the ecosystem and discuss some of the things that make Mint and Finch different. Finally, we’ll put together a quick project that makes use of Finch to put all of our learning into action. Let’s jump right in!

The sheer scale of connected devices across physical, virtual, and distributed networks has come to scale that it has become practically impossible for most network administrators to manually keep an eye on each node. Along with the scale, the connectivity between devices within each network has also become denser.

Lazy-loading is the most ironic term in programming. That’s because, instead of eating its third bowl of cereal on the couch, what lazy-loading actually does is make your User Interface more efficient. And efficient UI is important to us at Sentry. We don’t want our customers tapping their feet and pointing to their imaginary watch while waiting for their page to load.

Many of Spot’s AWS customers are using Kubernetes Operations (kops) to self-manage their Kubernetes clusters. The tool significantly simplifies cluster set up, lifecycle management via instance groups, Kubernetes Day 2 operations and generates Terraform configurations, making it a popular tool for deploying production-grade k8s clusters.

Kubernetes provides a powerful networking model for microservices. One of the pillars of this model is that each pod has its own IP address and is directly addressable within the cluster. As a consequence, each Kubernetes cluster usually has a flat virtual network that external hosts can’t reach directly. That means routing traffic from clients outside the cluster to services deployed inside the cluster requires some additional work.

Deploying a new feature to production is a momentous occasion. It's important to ensure that everything goes properly at this stage, as deployments tend to be error-prone when not handled correctly. To examine why this is and how you can avoid it, let's take a look at the different types of deployments available and where some of them fall short.