Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

At the beginning of 2020, none of us could have imagined what we would be talking and thinking about at the end of the year. At JFrog, we began by talking about unifying everything in the DevOps lifecycle. Of course very quickly, the message of unity and togetherness would soon become even bigger than we could imagine in light of the global pandemic.

The appearance of containers and their performance benefits compared to the existing paradigm of virtual machines has forced several companies to rethink their software lifecycle, especially the delivery part. Continuous integration and deployment tools (CI/CD) are passing through a second renaissance phase which is characterized by new approaches centered around short-lived environments that are launched and destroyed in a much more dynamic way.

In 2020, JFrog’s experts published a treasure trove of content — blogs, articles, infographics, and more — to share insights and advice with our customers and the DevOps community at large. In case you missed them — or want to re-read them — here’s a list of the most popular ones. They range from a primer on container registries to an explainer on achieving high-availability for your Maven repository.

Now that we know the advantages of leveraging Ketch over other tools such as Helm to ease the deployment of our applications (BLOG: Helm vs. Ketch when Deploying Applications), a good next step is for us to understand how we can tie Ketch to our CI pipeline and have an automated deployment process. For this example, we will leverage Ketch, GitHub Actions, and a Kubernetes cluster on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

When I started working at Purple managing the E-commerce stack, I inherited a single AWS EC2 instance that represented our entire infrastructure. The problem was, the company was doubling in size every few months, and with this exponential increase in load combined with the issues we were already experiencing with this infrastructure, it became a large business risk.

How many major versions of a given Go module are there? That simple question doesn’t always have an easy-to-discover answer. Golang’s unique system of semantic import versioning solves some key problems of ensuring Go module compatibility across dependencies. But it also makes it a bit harder to learn what major versions of a Go module are available. The go client doesn’t provide a way to find out, nor will it inform you when a newer major version of a dependency exists.

The last year was undeniably a different year for everybody. At the start of 2020, Coronavirus spread all over the world, resulting in a global pandemic. Covid affected the way we live, work, meet other people, and has drastically changed everyone’s lives in ways that we could not ever imagine. In a world of uncertainty, DevOps has undeniably become even more important.

Data from monitoring tools like Datadog are useful for developers to help them understand whether the code they've deployed is healthy or needs to be fixed or rolled back, or when there is an incident to investigate. As a deployment mission control, Sleuth helps developers see metrics data from a developer-centric point of view - by deployment - and interpret such data for them. ‍‍

The SolarWinds hack, which has affected high-profile Fortune 500 companies and large U.S. federal government agencies, has put the spotlight on software development security — a critical issue for the DevOps community and for JFrog. At a fundamental level, if the code released via CI/CD pipelines is unsafe, all other DevOps benefits are for naught.

One of the most typical challenges when deploying a complex application is the handling of different deployment environments during the software lifecycle. The most typical setup is the trilogy of QA/Staging/Production environments. An application developer needs an easy way to deploy to the different environments and also to understand what version is deployed where. Specifically for Kubernetes deployments, the Helm package manager is a great solution for handling environment configuration.