Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Microsoft 365 is a suite of cloud-based productivity and communication services that includes Microsoft Office applications (including OneNote and OneDrive) as well as other popular Microsoft tools like Skype and Teams. Microsoft 365 tools and services are at the core of many organizations’ data management and day-to-day workflows, so monitoring activity across your environment is key to making sure that these services remain secure and meet compliance standards.

Cloud Foundry is an open source deployment and orchestration platform that gives developers a readymade workflow for launching applications without configuring the underlying infrastructure. VMware Tanzu Application Service for VMs (TAS) is a commercially available certified platform for Cloud Foundry that provides complementary products like a partner network, auto-scaling CLI, and operations interface, and is used by enterprise-level customers like T-Mobile, The Home Depot, and Comcast.

There is no doubt that organizations have a difficult task to address the current requirements for building and managing APIs, especially if they don’t use tools like API Management. APIs require up-to-date and strong documentation, increased security levels, comprehensive testing, routine versioning, and high-reliability to be appropriately utilized.

The way we all work fundamentally changed during 2020. The global pandemic has accelerated the pace of digital evolution for many businesses, while prompting others to pivot or change course completely. The response to the crisis will continue well into 2021, but as we edge closer to the end of the year, many organisations will already be thinking about the longer term impact of the pandemic and how to realign their business for growth.

Remote teams that work on dependent products face resource crunches and delays. When several teams work on interrelated projects, the chances are high that they will soon end up meeting at some point where they have to wait for resource release from another team or teams. For instance, when team A wants an update to an app currently maintained by Team B, they would want to automatically access the latest version of the app whenever a new bug is fixed and an update is made.

Route SSH connections through HAProxy using the SSH ProxyCommand feature and SNI. Did you know that you can proxy SSH connections through HAProxy and route based on hostname? The advantage is that you can relay all SSH traffic through one public-facing server instead of needing to grant users direct access to potentially hundreds of internal servers from outside the network.

Service Mesh is an emerging architecture pattern gaining traction today. Along with Kubernetes, Service Mesh can form a powerful platform which addresses the technical requirements that arise in a highly distributed environment typically found on a microservices cluster and/or service infrastructure. A Service Mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer for facilitating service-to-service communications between microservices.

Have you ever wanted to try K3s high availability cluster “mode,” and you either did not have the minimum three “spare nodes” or the time required to set up the same amount of VMs? Then you are in for a good treat: meet k3d! If you’re not familiar with k3d, its name gives you a hint to what it’s all about: K3s in Docker.