This post will describe how to manually build a Ubuntu 18.04 Virtual Machine (VM) server using Oracle’s VirtualBox virtualisation software. Being able to build simple, expendable VMs is extremely useful, whether you’re writing software, building websites or just wanting to learn about Linux servers. We need to be able to SSH onto the server from our host machine to make access easier. To gain SSH access we therefore need to forward SSH’s port to our host.

For years, high-trust organizations relied on Hipchat for team messaging because—unlike many popular messaging platforms—it could be hosted on-premise or in a private cloud. In July 2018, however, they found out that Hipchat would be decommissioned this year. In search of a secure messaging solution to replace Hipchat, many of these companies have migrated to Mattermost, the open source messaging platform designed for DevOps teams.

Cycle aims to give you maximum flexibility with how you architect your application. By marking a container as ‘stateful’, you’re declaring that the container and its instances should be treated more like pets than cattle, but more on that analogy below. The need to maintain state should never be a deciding factor when considering whether or not to containerize as containers are simply portable code packages.

We currently have six major cloud platforms offering serverless products, AWS Lambda being the pioneer. Our goal is to provide a quick way to compare and evaluate all. For each service, we will be evaluating: There are smaller service providers on the market that are focused on serverless, but we won’t cover them in the present analysis. For the pricing comparison, we considered regions in the United States east coast. Let the battle begin!

Lambda Layers were introduced by AWS in late 2018 as a way to simplify the developer’s life when managing dependencies and shared resources across a multi-Lambda stack. It’s a versatile feature that brings many benefits, which we will discuss in this article. Using Lambda Layers does increase complexity to monitor and maintain your applications, but there’s no need to fear.

Kubernetes is a powerful platform that has shifted the way modern software operates and scales over the past five years. It’s got a strong open source community and benefits from innovation from the collective. Also, some of its current shortcomings are: difficulties in installation, complexity, and customization. In many ways, Kubernetes is like the Linux kernel: it provides a framework for running software, but none of the tools. This is where Kubernetes distributions (or distros) come in.

If you’ve dealt with lambda functions you may have run across the RequestEntityTooLargeException - * byte payload is too large for the Event invocation type (limit 131072 bytes) AWS Lambda exception that occurs when a function is invoked with too large of a payload. Current AWS Lambda limits are set at 6 MB for synchronous/RequestResponse invocations, and 128 K for asynchronous/Event invocations.

Another massive data breach was uncovered last week (30.6.19). The US-Israeli based company Cybereason traced via a year-long operation (called “Operation Soft Cell”), an attack that had been underway since 2012. This time it was the telecommunication sector that was hit. The most worrisome fact about this breach is not only the methods that were used (which were highly sophisticated) but the purpose of the hacking.

The following article is an excerpt from the book Achieving DevOps, a novel about delivering the best Agile, DevOps and Microservices, written by Dave Harrison and Knox Lively. This article is published with the author’s permission. A lateral line is how a fish monitors the surrounding water for changes in pressure, allowing it to understand the environment. This is how fish can survive in a very harsh, always-changing environment; without it, the fish is ‘blind’ and cannot survive.

In a Kubernetes cluster, the machines are divided into two main groups: worker nodes and master nodes. Worker nodes run your pods and the applications within them, whereas the master node runs the Kubernetes Control Plane, which is responsible for the management of the worker nodes. The Control Plane makes scheduling decisions, monitors the cluster, and implements changes to get the cluster to a desired state.