This is the second blog in our series releasing the WSLConf recordings. Earlier this year, Canonical had the pleasure of hosting WSLConf, a virtual conference dedicated to the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). The conference highlighted ideas and projects from presenters from around the globe with attendees from at least eight different time zones.

Modern-day life is fast, hectic, demanding. Time is precious, and we often need to be able to squeeze every atom of efficiency from our environment and our tools. But sometimes, the best thing you can do for your productivity is – to do nothing. Sometimes, less is more. In this article, we want to show you a number of nice, fun and not-strictly-productivity-focused apps that can help you relax, forget about the time-efficiency continuum, and recharge your cells for the next lap in the race.

PostgreSQL offers flexibility on how data is stored and compared in a relational database. This is why it’s so popular among enterprises as a solution for their database requirements. Although PostgreSQL is quite reliable, database problems are inevitable, especially in large-scale environments. Ignoring these problems could result in a plunge in the productivity of your business.

An incident postmortem is not only an essential document for reference, but also necessary as a process by which teams can collaboratively learn from failure, and communicate independent learnings across the organization.

When organizations shift to a work-from-home environment, identity and access management (IAM) takes center stage. Organizations with remote workforces must fortify their IAM policies and tools for a better user experience to ensure productivity, while also handling all the security challenges remote work presents to ensure data and system security. One of the biggest risks an organization faces when its workforce goes remote is unnecessary and unauthorized access to organizational data.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many companies to require employees to work from home. It’s a new normal for many, but at Grafana Labs our team has always recruited and operated with a remote-first culture in mind. To help everyone transition to a home office environment, we launched a new WFH series in which Grafana team members have been sharing their best advice for staying productive at home – yes, even if you have kids around.

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.