Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The job market for IT professionals right now is challenging. Whether you’re seeking your first job in IT or looking to further your career into a more pronounced and distinguished role, certifications serve as a way to separate from the crowd of applicants. Certifications show a functional level of proficiency, often making them more valuable than college degrees in certain entry-level positions, and just as valuable as years of experience in more established roles.

So you’ve got a shiny new Kubernetes cluster up and it’s a dream. Deploying code is easy, scaling is a breeze, and you’ve never felt so efficient. However, despite claims that Kubernetes is self-healing, there’s still a nagging feeling in the back of your mind that wants to make sure your cluster is running smoothly. Just like any other tool, you need a monitoring solution to give you insight into Kubernetes.

Nowadays, software development teams utilize continuous delivery or some variation, to create better, faster, more accurate software releases. Continuous delivery is a DevOps practice that empowers software teams to continuously ship code directly to an environment once automated tests pass. Continuous delivery is facilitated through the deployment pipeline. You can read more about it in a previous post.

Kubernetes upgrades are always a tough undertaking when your clusters are running smoothly. Upgrades are necessary as every three months, Kubernetes releases a new version. If you do not upgrade your Kubernetes clusters, within a year, you can fall far behind. Rancher has always focused on solving problems, and they are at it again with a new open source project called System Upgrade Controller. In this tutorial, we will see how to upgrade a K3s Kubernetes cluster using System Upgrade Controller.

Logs in continuous delivery pipelines are often entirely ignored, right up until something goes wrong. We usually find ourselves wishing we’d put some thought into our logs, once we’re in the midst of trawling through thousands of lines. In order to try to prevent this, we can add DevOps metrics into our logs, which will provide us with greater observability, and give insight into anything going wrong in our pipelines.

As the cloud-native ecosystem continues to evolve, many alternative solutions are popping-up, that challenges the status quo of application deployment methodologies. One of these solutions that is quickly gaining traction is Unikernels, which are executable images that can run natively on a hypervisor without the need for a separate operating system.

Before we can talk about the nuts and bolts of cloud transformation, it’s important to make the distinction from digital transformation. The two are often conflated, and while they are related, they are not the same—the cloud is the enabler of digital transformation. If you’re starting from scratch, cloud-native is the way to go.