For decades, information technology in the financial services industry meant deploying bulky applications onto monolithic systems like mainframes. These systems have a proven track record of reliability, but don’t offer the flexibility and scalability of more modern architectures such as microservices and cloud computing. During periods of unexpectedly high demand, this inflexibility can cause technical issues for organizations ranging from personal trading platforms to major banks.

When SUSE, the world’s largest independent open source company, announced its acquisition of Rancher Labs in early July 2020, the industry took notice. Clearly, the Kubernetes management industry is very much alive. But, the merger also raised the question of what this means for users? After all, a key value proposition of cloud native technologies, like SUSE, is that they are modular, interoperable, and flexible.

15 July 2020: Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, today announces the launch of its enhanced Global System Integrator (GSI) Programme. Alongside new partnership benefits, it includes resell and integration opportunities for the entirety of Canonical’s secure, open source portfolio for the data centre, multi-cloud, edge and IoT.

Log messages help us to understand data flow through applications, as well as spot when and where errors are occurring. There are a lot of resources for how to store and view logs for applications running on traditional services, but Kubernetes breaks the existing model by running many applications per server and abstracting away most of the maintenance for your applications. In this blog post, we focus on log management for applications running in Kubernetes by reviewing the following topics.

With the extreme changes we’ve all been through these last several months, it should come as no surprise that our jobs have changed drastically, too. We’re working remotely. We’re dealing with increased resource constraints. Our services are receiving more traffic than usual, and we’re tasked with keeping things up and running. Our work-as-done may not match what we did at the beginning of 2020.

One of the key features of Ocean by Spot is a “headroom” feature, the ability to maintain a dynamic buffer of spare capacity for immediate scale-up. Ocean continuously predicts which workloads are most likely to require scale-up and adjusts headroom in line with this prediction to enable immediate scheduling of new tasks, without waiting for infrastructure provisioning. This shortens the time to execution for these workloads and dramatically speeds up the scale-up process.

Prometheus is a CNCF graduated project for monitoring and alerting. It is one of the most widely used monitoring and alerting tools in the Kubernetes ecosystem. Rancher users can leverage Prometheus quickly by using the built-in monitoring stack. Prometheus stores its metrics as a time series database on the local disk. Prometheus local storage is limited by the size of the disk and amount of metrics it can retain.

In 2019, the Netdata team already knew that a Netdata Cloud solution in the form of an online platform would greatly complement Netdata’s distributed monitoring by making it much easier to organize large infrastructures and by enabling new ways for teams to collaborate. The old node registry available at the time wasn’t enough for Netdata’s users. Building an online platform, even one that does not directly process users’ metrics, is challenging.

I am making a digital transformation during this novel work-from-home (WFH) era due to a COVID-19 quarantine. Many of you are going through the same and distractions abound while sharing a workspace with housemates, children, and pets. Moreover, we have to contend with an increased risk to cybersecurity, given recent attacks on work-related software such as Slack and Zoom.