Digital transformation and IT modernisation initiatives provide innovations to create a competitive edge and drive business growth. But they’ve also created increasingly complex environments that need to be managed by teams that are strapped for time and resources.

One of the challenges when you’re starting out with DevOps is getting the lay of the land. There are a lot of tools out there. And when one of the goals of DevOps is continually improving your processes, it’s important for you to understand how those tools might fit in your infrastructure. At the same time, you want to be efficient. You don’t want to add tools that overlap with one another. Or tools that cost more than other effective alternatives.

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.

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.