Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Back in May we did a soft-launch of The RanchCast. We debuted it as a Twitch stream and produced a couple of episodes that you can now find on The RanchCast YouTube channel. After those episodes aired, I went through the feedback from the community and other streamers. Now we’re ready to re-launch.

Ansible is an automation tool for provisioning, managing, and deploying infrastructure and applications. When building large-scale applications, Ansible enables users to manage and configure their infrastructure across platforms like AWS. Whether you rely on temporary or dedicated hosts, you can use Ansible to create a repeatable process for configuring them with the Datadog Agent.

Load balancing, traffic management, authentication and authorization, service discovery — these are just some of the interactions taking place between microservices. Collectively called a “service mesh”, these interconnections can become an operations headache when handling large‑scale, complex applications. Istio seeks to reduce this complexity by providing engineers with an easy way to manage a service mesh.

Amazon CloudFront is a CDN that allows you to serve content from edge locations without having to actually stand up infrastructure around the world. However, since it’s a managed service, you have less visibility with traditional monitoring tools. As such, it becomes even more important to take advantage of the available monitoring tools in AWS. In this post, we’ll explain how to use CloudWatch to monitor CloudFront and what is important to watch.

This week Rancher Labs announced a record 161% year-on-year revenue growth, along with a 52% increase in the number of customers in the first half of 2019. Other highlights from H1’19 included: You can find the complete release here. We are grateful to our community of customers, partners, and users for the growth we achieved in the first half of 2019, and we will continue to gauge Rancher’s success in the larger context of enterprise adoption of Kubernetes.

In the second part of his series comparing CICD services for serverless applications, Erez Rokah, developer of the open source aws-testing-library, focuses on the popular commercial tool, CircleCI.

Logspout is an open source log router designed specifically for Docker container logs. If you’ve ever looked into log management for Docker, chances are you’ve heard of it. Logspout is a container that collects logs from all other containers running on the same host, then forwards them to a destination of your choice. This lets you send logs to an HTTP/S server, syslog server, or other endpoint without having to monitor files or modify your host systems.

The shift to cloud computing and the DevOps revolution have fueled some important changes in the way we think about software development and monitoring. It has delivered huge benefits to the companies that have fully embraced the approach. In fact, the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) 2018 industry survey found a new small group of “elite” performers that are deploying code far more often and having a far better mean time to resolution (MTTR) than the next closest group.

When you build and deploy an application, chances are that you need to store some form of secrets. These are typically things like credentials for 3rd party systems and database credentials. As an ASP.NET Core developer, Microsoft provides you with an easy way to store secrets like these in your development environment, namely the Secret Manager.