If you’ve built a serverless application or two, you’re probably familiar with the benefits of serverless architecture. You take advantage of already built, managed cloud services to handle standard application requirements like authentication, storage, compute, API gateways, and a long list of other infrastructure needs. You can spin up these resources in a matter of minutes and add your own specific business logic (usually as AWS Lambda function code).

The mechanism for interacting with Kubernetes on a daily basis is typically through a command line tool called kubectl. kubectl is primarily used to communicate with Kubernetes API servers to create, update, delete workloads within Kubernetes. The objective of this tutorial is to provide an overview of some of the common commands that you can utilise, as well as provide a good starting point in managing Kubernetes.

When it comes to hosting applications, business and IT administrators often need to make tough decisions as to whether cloud hosting or retention of the software at their own data center is the preferred option. Public cloud hosting may have the edge in terms of scale and distribution, but there are certain instances where an onsite approach to application hosting is a better idea.

DevOps is a very data-driven practice. After the right cultural changes take place within an organization to adopt DevOps, teams often rely heavily on monitoring, measurement, and continuous improvement to keep their projects on track. The best teams use KPIs to benchmark their performance and report up to management. However, there’s one metric your DevOps team might not be tracking: The cloud cost of their engineering decisions.

Secure access to your own private registry helps control who has access to your images. Compared to usage-based services such as Docker Hub and Quay, a Cycle hosted private registry only consumes the resources you give it access to, yielding a more cost-effective deployment. Let’s take a look at how simple it is to deploy a private Docker registry on Cycle.

We recently removed webpacker from our Rails 5 application. While it was a great way to bootstrap a new Rails app with a significant amount of Javascript we encountered some serious performance problems that we felt really impacted our productivity. We build our application images after every git push and we’d like to be able to deploy them quickly.

A recent survey from Capgemini revealed that while enterprise-scale automation is still in its infancy, IT automation projects are moving along (below). IT is starting to view automation less tactically, and more strategically.

Have you ever been confused about the different ways to handle missing data in the Ruby language? I know I have, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that. The options Ruby offers come in the form of several methods: “present?”, “blank?”, “nil?”, and “empty?”. There are all somewhat related since all of them check for the absence of data in some way.