Competition is a funny thing. To gain or keep an edge against your competitors, you may need to push the envelope to use newer technologies and processes. But done wrong, that very technology or process could lead to your ruin. This is where we are with DevOps. The methodology that became popular in the mid-to-late 2000s is embraced by many companies . Done the right way, it will help your organization challenge its competition to keep up with customer and user demands.

Over the last decade, DevOps has become an important part of software engineering culture, influenced by the wide adoption of microservices, containers and cloud computing. A recent step in the evolution of cloud-based and microservice architecture is the serverless computing – a code execution model where the cloud provider takes total responsibility for the operating system and hardware management.

With the vast number of innovations in the DevOps space—and more arriving all the time—it's hard for businesses to know which DevOps developments warrant their attention and which can be forgotten. Here's how to tell the difference.

It has taken much longer than usual for the CentOS team to provide us with a new version of their operating system; however, the wait is over. The new CentOS 8 is here. CentOS, or Community ENTerprise Operating System, is a binary-level clone of the RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) distribution that can be accessed for free. For those unfamiliar with Red Hat, Red Hat offers open source, enterprise-oriented software solutions with enterprise-level support.

Chaos engineering (CE) is the discipline of experimenting on a system in order to build confidence in the system’s capability to withstand turbulent conditions in production. This approach is becoming commonplace in software development and operations (DevOps) practices. But how would its application extend to ITOps? CE for ITOps offers a similar framework for stress-testing a technology platform to understand its weak points and performance pitfalls under heavy pressure.

Debugging performance issues in production can be a pain and, in some cases, impossible without the right tools. Java profilers have been around forever, but the profilers most developers think about are only one type: standard JVM profilers. However, using one type of profiler is not enough. Suppose you’re analyzing your application’s performance. There are multiple profiling activities which you may execute.

Not long ago, we talked about the need to maintain visibility across all of your multicloud investments so you can keep track of how well they are working for you as well as how much they are costing you. Historically, this has meant building reports on numbers of VMs in use, system utilization, storage consumption, and the like. But much has changed since the early days of hypervisors, and organizations creating cloud-based services today are moving quickly toward serverless models.

Windows Support went GA for Kubernetes in version 1.14 and represented years of work. This has been the effort of excellent engineers from companies including Microsoft, Pivotal, VMWare, RedHat, and the now-defunct Apprenda, among others. I’ve been a lurker and occasional contributor to the sig-windows community going back to my days with Apprenda, and I’ve continued to follow it in my current role with Rancher Labs.