Datadog’s rapid growth illustrates a couple of key industry themes: First, growth in cloud applications continues at an unprecedented rate, and second, cloud applications require enterprises to rethink existing tools for visibility. Most significantly, the fact that Datadog has grown rapidly even as traditional monitoring companies have floundered, is a clear illustration of how companies built for a cloud era will disrupt those that were built for an on-premises era.

Support for relational databases is a growing focus for Kubernetes users, and the release of Windows Server 2019 is expanding options for .NET applications and SQL Server. SQL Server workloads, however, often rely on Active Directory and Windows Auth, and storage arrays, which will not be supported by SQL Server containers on Windows Server 2019. Fortunately, a new Rancher Labs partner, Windocks, offers new options for SQL Server on Kubernetes and Rancher.

Once you’ve got software engineers applying for your job opening, you’ll need to determine who is good enough to interview, and who is not. Additionally, you’ll want to make sure the time investment made by you and your team has a high return on investment. In this part of our series on hiring software engineers as the CTO of a startup, we’ll talk about Blue Matador’s approach to the screening process and the insights I’ve gained in this part of this CTO experience.

K3s and Traefik are partnering to speed up cloud native applications deployment. K3s, by Rancher, is the best way to have a lightweight, fully CNCF conformant Kubernetes cluster running on diverse infrastructures, including possible IoT appliances such as Raspberry Pis. K3s starts in seconds thanks to its light weight nature. As it adds some components to the cluster automatically, k3s is very easy to use and therefore very accessible for new users.

Kubernetes 1.16 is almost here and it’s packed with cool new features, like ephemeral containers for easy pod debugging, support for dual-stack network in pods, many new options for the scheduler… And we are just getting started! Here is the list of what’s new in Kubernetes 1.16.

After many months of feverishly working behind the scenes, we’re beyond excited to announce that the #KUBE100 beta program is live. #KUBE100 is the name of the beta program for the Civo Kubernetes service. What makes it unique is that it’s the first k3s-powered managed Kubernetes service on the market. Here's a little more insight into what we want to achieve with #KUBE100, from our CTO, Andy.

Kubernetes is great but complex! Whether to enable hybrid and multi-cloud, promote deeper specialization among development teams, enhance reliability, or simply stay ahead of the curve, organizations are reaping the varied benefits of this technology investment— but it comes at a cost. With each optimization, there are tradeoffs. With each layer of abstraction comes less visibility, resulting in more complexity when something goes wrong.

Mattermost is a state-of-the-art, highly scalable open source messaging platform for secure team collaboration. Kubernetes is a robust open source container management platform that runs on any land-based or cloud infrastructure and automates the installation, configuration, and maintenance of diverse, highly distributed systems. It sounds like Mattermost and Kubernetes are made for each other. And it’s getting even better.

Almost every Kubernetes tutorial speaks about how to quickly deploy a container in a pod and expose it as a service. Mostly these tutorials focus on stateless services and ignore a deeper explanation of state management in Kubernetes. But Kubernetes supports both types of deployments, the stateless deployments and stateful deployments and they have somewhat different operational requirements.

When learning a new technology like Istio, it’s always a good idea to take a look at sample apps. Istio repo has a few sample apps but they fall short in various ways. BookInfo is covered in the docs and it is a good first step. However, it is too verbose with too many services for me and the docs seem to focus on managing the BookInfo app, rather than building it from ground up. There’s a smaller helloworld sample but it’s more about autoscaling than anything else.