Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

When Grafana Labs CEO and co-founder Raj Dutt announced to the team that the company would be relicensing our core open source projects from Apache 2.0 to AGPLv3, he opened the floor for discussion and encouraged anyone who had further questions to reach out. We believe in honesty and transparency, so we collected hard questions from Grafanistas, and Raj answered them for this public Q&A. The time felt right. As I’ve said publicly before, I’ve been thinking about this topic for years.

Hyperconverged Infrastructure is a unified system that combines computer network and storage in one easy way to manage virtualized systems. To give you a brief understanding, these systems have two major components hypervisors and storage controllers. To elaborate further, typically the hyper converged systems are available as fully integrated hardware appliances and a standalone software. The question now arises how does it work?

Responding to and ignoring notifications can be a full-contact sport. It makes sense, though, from GitHub, Slack, to Jira and Sentry; our world revolves around robots telling us everything is important, critical, and urgent. Just like that, it’s near impossible to see what actually matters so you can solve quicker and more comprehensively.

Recently, Amazon AWS introduced the new feature EC2 Serial Console for instances using Nitro System. It provides a simple and secure way to perform troubleshooting by establishing a connection to the serial port of an instance. Even though this feature is useful in case of break glass situations, from a security perspective, it could be used by adversaries to gain access through an unguarded secondary entrance.

SCOM 2019 is a monitoring powerhouse. Its capabilities are unmatched. But it also has some serious issues when it comes to unearthing and visualizing the valuable data locked inside. The replacement of Silverlight with HTML5 in the SCOM 2019 web console was a welcome enhancement, but the SCOM web console still shares its design with the administration console, which is slow, complex, and makes it downright difficult to get the visibility you need.

In this tutorial, I will show you how to build and deploy a Jekyll static site to AWS S3 + Cloudfront using GitHub Actions. At PagerTree we use GitHub Actions to automate the building and deploying of our marketing site pagertree.com. These days, if you have to do anything manually more than a couple of times, you should probably be automating it. GitHub Actions make it easy to automate software workflows.

“Cost” would seem to underpin almost every decision IT teams make. Sure, business requirements drive overall operations budgets, but it’s always in tension with decades-old certainties about cost. It’s long been the unyielding constant of IT equations. In particular, IT pros migrating application infrastructures out of the data center have discovered the on-premises math of cost containment no longer works.

A few months ago, I was asked if I wanted to develop an open-source Terraform provider. Eleanor Saitta, principal at Systems Structure Ltd, had a client who was setting up JFrog Xray across their Github repositories but didn’t want to configure each repository by hand. As an SRE who enjoys working on projects that automate away those sorts of pain points (and someone who works extensively with Terraform during their day job), this sounded like an interesting project to work on.

Over the past year, we have witnessed remarkable changes brought on by our response to a global pandemic. Along with accelerated digital transformation and the consumerization of technology, Covid-19 has birthed the everywhere workplace, where users work with any device, to connect to business-critical systems and applications. Work has become something you do rather than a place you go.

Serverless computing is one of the fastest-growing areas in software development, along with hybrid clouds and using multi-cloud strategies. The global serverless architecture market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 16.2% in 2021 through 2026. It will reach $10.29 billion from $4.2 billion in 2020, according to MarketWatch. The serverless approach promises to help developers beat the cons of self-managed and even virtual server infrastructure. But is serverless right for you?