Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

School’s out for… Autumn? That’s right, while you were avoiding the back-to-school rush at Office Depot, cutting the crusts off PB&Js, and taking the layers out of mothballs (confession: I have never seen let alone used a single mothball), Serverless Summer School began winding down and is now over for the season. Until next year, school-themed Stackery livestreams!

If you run Microsoft’s Hyper-V as your virtualisation platform rather than the ever popular VMware ESX then you probably want a way to manage your Hyper-V hosts as well as the virtual machines that reside on this. Well you can do a lot of the functions that SCVMM does with the free tool for managing Hyper-V, the Hyper-V Manager (which comes as part of the Windows Operating System). System Centre Virtual Machine Manager is also called System Centre VMM or SCVMM for short.

Five worthy reads is a regular column on five noteworthy items we’ve discovered while researching trending and timeless topics. This week, we delve into the increasing adoption of XaaS models across enterprises to achieve agility, pervasive automation, and digitization of business verticals.

We live in a containerized world, and traditional monitoring and logging are being forever changed. The dynamic and ephemeral nature of containers creates new logging challenges. Docker addresses these in some ways. Docker Engine provides various logging drivers that determine where logs are sent or written to. The default driver for Docker logs is “json-file,” which writes the logs to local files on the Docker host in json format.

Kubernetes has fundamentally changed the way we manage our production environments. The ability to quickly bring up infrastructure on demand is a beautiful thing, but along with it brings some complexity, especially when it comes to logging. Logging is always an important part of maintaining a solid running infrastructure, but even more so with Kubernetes. Because Kubernetes clusters are constantly being spun up, spun down, always in flux, making sure logging functions correctly is critical.

It’s been a few years since the “Spotify Model” became the latest trend for structuring an engineering team. But, like its predecessors, the model based on tribes and squads has some pitfalls. How to structure an engineering team is a question that’s been covered at length, from the strengths and weaknesses of common team structures to a matrix of organization based on risk and scale to why you should choose your own model.

In the past I’ve written about how to use informers in Kubernetes for particular resources, but what if you need to be able to receive events for any Kubernetes resource dynamically? Well, there’s a client-go package for that too. At FireHydrant, we recently updated our Kubernetes integration to watch changes for any resource you configure and I wanted to write down how we made it at a high level.