Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Kubernetes 1.18 is about to be released! After the small release that was 1.17, 1.18 comes strong and packed with novelties. Where do we begin? There are new features, like the OIDC discovery for the API server and the increased support for Windows nodes, that will have a big impact on the community. We are also happy to see how some features that have been on Alpha state for too long are now being reconsidered and prepared for the spotlight, like Ingress or the API Server Network Proxy.

The experts from Azure Functions team has yet again joined us for the monthly webcast. Given the unprecedented time, this webcast happened a bit unusual where the folks joined from their home rather from Channel 9 studio and which made this webcast even more unique and exciting. In this session, Jeff Hollan, Eduardo and Alex Karcher have joined to give us the picture of the latest happenings in the Azure Functions space.

VMware vSphere is a server virtualization platform that enables organizations to provision and manage virtual machines at scale. With its comprehensive suite of products, vSphere helps companies manage datacenter resources, migrate workloads without downtime, run applications with high availability, and more. To keep tabs on dynamic vSphere environments and effectively address resource bottlenecks, you need deep visibility across every part of your infrastructure.

At re:Invent in December, Amazon announced the AWS Graviton2 processor and its forthcoming availability powering Amazon EC2 M6g instances. While the first-generation Graviton processor that powered A1 instances was better suited to less compute-intensive workloads, this processor is intended to offer AWS customers a compelling alternative to conventional x86-powered instances on both performance and cost.

This is a guest post from Kamesh Pemmaraju of Platform9. As organizations move to a containerized world, whether by producing containerized software, consuming it or both, the need for a managed Kubernetes offering and an Enterprise-tested private Docker registry is apparent. With the introduction of Platform9‘s new Freedom Plan for managed Kubernetes, you can combine it with JFrog Container Registry and power up your containerization transformation for free.

Prometheus is an open-source system for monitoring and alerting originally developed by Soundcloud. It moved to Cloud Native Computing Federation (CNCF) in 2016 and became one of the most popular projects after Kubernetes. It can monitor everything from an entire Linux server to a stand-alone web server, a database service or a single process. In Prometheus terminology, the things it monitors are called Targets. Each unit of a target is called a metric.

It was a cloudy winter morning when I had arrived at the office and found, to our horror, that a Kubernetes cluster was suffering from extremely high CPU and network usage and had become almost completely non-functional. To make things worse, restarting the nodes (the go-to DevOp solution), seemed to have absolutely no effect on the issue. Something was poisoning the network and we had to find out what it was and fast.

Monitoring has moved from a simple proactive practice to a necessity on any product launch checklist. It is crucial to pick a tool that meets your observability needs & ensures reliability of your service to your customers. Over the years, with an increase in adoption of DevOps and SRE practices, Monitoring has moved from a simple proactive practice to a necessity on any product launch checklist.