Software development (SDLC) value streams aren’t difficult to understand; you correlate all activity in the development process from planning to prod and relate activity to key objectives such as impact on revenue, application quality and user satisfaction. Unfortunately, most organizations approach value streams on an ad-hoc, manual basis. This approach to value streams requires significant effort, is prone to error and creates huge opportunity costs.

This is the second in my series on the cloud. I started writing about cloud visibility and in this article, we take a look at cloud costs. If we look at the evolution of computing over the past 30 or so years, it has always been about monumental shifts in technology, which drive further and further innovation, efficiencies and – seemingly – cost reduction.

GitLab CI/CD is a tool that is built into GitLab. It allows you to create automated tasks that you can use to form a Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery / Deployment process. You configure GitLab CI/CD by adding a yaml file (called `.gitlab-ci.yml`) to your source repository. This file creates a pipeline, which will then run when a code change is pushed to the repository. Pipelines are made up of a series of stages, and each stage can each contain a number of jobs or scripts.

Public sector organizations face a unique challenge when it comes to the cloud: how can they successfully migrate their operations while maintaining an air-tight, heavily regulated, massively distributed environment? To solve this problem, Amazon created the AWS GovCloud (US), two isolated Regions in the AWS ecosystem that are only accessible to US customers who meet strict security and compliance standards.

The Rancher Academy launched on May 15, 2020. Here we are, 94 days later, and we’ve issued our 1,000th certificate to a graduate of the Certified Rancher Operator: Level 1 course. Rancher is open source software, so anyone can download it and use it. With that freedom, though, comes a cost: we all learn how to use it according to how we need to use it. Through this lens, the actual potential of Rancher becomes distorted, and the experience of each individual varies widely.

The standard Command Line Interface for Kubernetes (kubectl) is a very powerful tool for debugging or monitoring purposes. It is very inefficient, but just if you want to get a high-level overview of your Kubernetes cluster or want to work with multiple resources at the same time. A large number of graphical Kubernetes dashboards exist today and chances are that you already used the default Kubernetes dashboard or the one that comes with your cloud provider.

COVID-19 is leading to large-scale migrations away from on-premises environments, according to Codefresh’s second annual State of DevOps survey that revealed this and other surprising insights into the continued evolution of the industry. At the same time, DevOps automation continues to expand in scope and complexity with more and more processes becoming automated, and more involved technologies like Kubernetes continuing to gain strong traction.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication on Container Security provides a comprehensive review of the major risks for core components of a container system. One of the most obvious objects of concern (alongside a host of other things to keep a good security professional up at night) is, of course, the containers running on your platform. Container security is obviously critical to your applications and data.