Enterprise applications rely on large amounts of data that needs to be distributed, processed, and stored. Data platforms offer data management services via a combination of open source and commercially supported software stacks. These services enable accelerated development and deployment of data-hungry business applications. Building a containerized data analytics platform comprising different software stacks comes with several deployment challenges.

The Prometheus Blackbox exporter allows endpoints exploration over several protocols, such as HTTP(S), DNS, TCP, and ICMP. This exporter generates multiple metrics on your configured targets, like general endpoint status, response time, redirect information, or certificate expiration dates. The Blackbox Exporter works out-of-the-box, as it just focuses on external visibility details. To get more detailed metrics, you can instrument your applications.

We are pleased to announce the general availability of D2iQ Kaptain 1.1, the new version of our end-to-end platform for Machine Learning on Kubernetes. D2iQ Kaptain 1.1 builds on the Four Awesome Things from Kaptain 1.0.

We are happy to share the v0.3.0 release of Rancher Desktop. This release brings more stability, some new features, and a fresh look to the UI. This screenshot shows the preferences screen while in dark mode on Mac. In the lower left corner the status when performing an action is now displayed. This status will tell you when Rancher Desktop needs to download something, such as a version of Kubernetes you have now used before, or when another step is happening.

There was a big announcement this year at GrafanaCon 2021 that performance testing tool k6 is being aquired by Grafana Labs. It was really exciting news for folks who cheer for open source because these are two giant projects. At time of this writing, k6 has over 12K stars and Grafana with a respectable 42K stars on Github as well. In full transparency, I have used both of those repos many times over the years and am a fellow stargazer.

When we were moving an app to Kubernetes, we encountered a peculiar situation where other services running on Kubernetes started throwing a ThreadError from time to time, saying that a resource is unavailable. We started investigating, and it turned out that you want to know where your AppSignal error has occurred. A short reminder - Kubernetes works on two levels: So, you want to know which pod and which node ran a particular AppSignal transaction.

Welcome to another monthly update on what’s new from Sysdig! Happy Pride month! We hope you are celebrating safely, in whatever manner you choose. It’s been over 50 years since the Stonewall riots, but we continue to fight for equality and justice. Love is love, and we’re sending you all of ours! Thank you to Marsha P. Johnson, Brenda Howard, and countless others for fighting for the freedom that many of us today enjoy.

For those of us who need to get applications running in Kubernetes, having Kubernetes on the desktop is incredibly useful. When we want to focus on our applications, it’s especially useful when Kubernetes is easy to use. This is where Rancher Desktop comes in. Rancher Desktop provides easy-to-use Kubernetes and container management (something we’ll look at in a moment) for Mac and Windows. Having Kubernetes isn’t enough.

Microsoft has begun working with the Docker team and community so Docker can be used for the following: If you would like to run an ASP.NET Core web app in a Docker container and learn how to create images, we will explain all the steps on how to do the following: A Docker container image is a standalone, lightweight package that can be executed and contains all the requirements you need to run an application, such as: code, runtime, libraries, and settings.

By implementing these vulnerability assessment and vulnerability management best practices you will reduce the attack surface of your infrastructure. We’re human, and many things we build aren’t perfect. That’s why we take our cars for a periodic inspection, or why we have organizations certifying that products are safe to use. Software is no different.