Most modern infrastructure architectures are complex to deploy, involving many parts. Despite the benefits of automation, many teams still chose to configure their architecture manually, carried out by a deployment expert or, in some cases, teams of deployment engineers. Manual configurations open up the door for human error. While DevOps is very useful in developing and deploying software, using Git combined with CI/CD is useful beyond the world of software engineering.

Kubernetes has become the backbone of modern container orchestration, enabling seamless deployment and management of containerized applications. However, as applications grow in complexity, so do the challenges of managing their Kubernetes infrastructure. Enter cdk8s, a revolutionary toolset that transforms Kubernetes configuration into a developer-friendly experience.

Discover Cloudsmith Navigator: a revolutionary tool designed to guide software engineering teams in selecting top-quality open source packages. By analyzing and scoring thousands of packages based on security, maintenance, and documentation, Navigator simplifies the package selection process. Choosing the right software package for your project can sometimes feel like finding a needle in a haystack.

At Circle, our traditional approach to Kubernetes (k8s) deployments likely looks familiar to many of you: Run the workflow, create the image, build the Helm chart and deliver it to k8s. At that point, k8s takes over with its rolling update. This method gets the job done, but we knew it wasn’t ideal. Limited support for canary releases and the need for time-consuming error monitoring and manual rollbacks added friction and risk to our release processes.

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, where software development and deployment happen at lightning speed, DevOps has emerged as the key to achieving operational excellence and maintaining a competitive edge. DevOps is more than just a buzzword; it’s a culture, a set of practices, and a collection of powerful tools that streamline collaboration between development and operations teams.

Alan Carson writes about his experience and journey with Cloudsmith, as new CEO Glenn Weinstein steps in as leadership. I heard something recently, that resonated, about success. In a simple (but not easy) three-step plan; success happens when the following three things align: A great example is, of course, Steve Jobs and Apple. The contrarian idea was that every single human would need a personal computer. He was proven right. And he executed expertly (with a few ups and downs obviously!)

For many software engineering teams, most testing is done in their CI/CD pipeline. New deployments run through a gauntlet of unit tests, integration tests, and even performance tests to ensure quality. However, there's one key test type that's excluded from this list, and it's one that can have a critical impact on your application and your organization: reliability tests. As software changes, reliability risks get introduced.

Starting with Argo CD 2.4, creating config management plugins or CMPs via configmap has been deprecated, with support fully removed in Argo CD 2.8. While many folks have been using their own config management plugins to do things like `kustomize –enable-helm`, or specify specific version of Helm, etc – most of these seem to have not noticed the old way of doing things has been removed until just now!