Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Multi cloud has long been a contentious topic when you talk about cloud infrastructure. Infrastructure as code tools such as Terraform and Pulumi have made deploying to any cloud much easier - you can now use a single interface to deploy infrastructure to virtually any cloud environment. However, the effort of creating infrastructure for each cloud provider still requires significant expertise and time to get right, leading many to see it as a effort not worth taking.

Docker is the industry leader in the world of containerization. While the concept of containers is not new, still, it was not easy to create new containers. The underlying operating system complexities of creating a container were very challenging. Docker changed that and made things easier by handling the complexities mentioned above to launch a container. It's now super easy for developers to build, manage, scale and deploy their applications securely using Docker.

Kubernetes is today’s leading container management platform, due to its comprehensive API and developer-friendly features. Using Kubernetes, you can create scalable and reliable applications that run on-premises systems and public clouds. Its out-of-the-box features allow it to distribute hundreds of instances over data centers and keep them up and running. In order to catch up with the automation level of Kubernetes, developing and deploying applications requires more autonomy.

Enterprises spent US$178 billion on cloud infrastructure services in 2021, 37% more than in 2020. And “global spending on cloud services is expected to reach over US$482 billion in 2022.” Clearly the use of cloud services is on the rise. But what are cloud services exactly, and why are they beneficial? Cloud services are infrastructure, platforms, or software that are hosted by third-party providers and made available to users through the internet.

PlanetScale is a serverless, MySQL-compatible database platform powered by Vitess. PlanetScale handles database scaling while also providing you with the tools to increase your development velocity, such as branching, non-blocking schema changes, automatic backups, built-in connection pooling, as well as a helpful interface and CLI. Datadog’s new integration gives you deep visibility into your PlanetScale databases, so you can optimize your usage and costs.

It is an exciting time to be a startup. Our vast technological landscape has made powerful digital tools available to businesses of all sizes, making starting (and scaling) an organization easier than ever before. In an era where technology is a fundamental building block of almost every business, methodologies like DevOps have become ubiquitous across many industries.

To keep ahead of the curve, many organizations are looking at how to evolve their technical processes to accelerate their IT infrastructure development. Fast and robust deployments to the latest platforms are key to achieving the low lead times that enable this evolution. Two of the most widely-used technologies to host these deployments are serverless functions and containers. What are they, how do they differ, and how do you decide which is best for your application?

Writing tests in any programming language can be difficult, but it does not have to be. In this tutorial, I will show you how you can easily write and run tests using Flask and Pytest. As a bonus, we will also integrate a CI/CD pipeline to run tests on a Flask app using CircleCI. Be sure to check out our other Flask tutorials to learn about application logging, authentication decorators, and automating Flask deployments.