Kubernetes has become the default container orchestrator framework, setting the standard for application deployment in a distributed architecture. At D2iQ, we’re proud to work with some of the world’s largest organizations as they deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters on their cloud native journeys.

2020 was, needless to say, not the best. Looking on the brighter side, in December, FireHydrant turned 2, and in spite of it all, we grew quite a bit. We raised our $8M Series A in May, our team grew nearly 4x in size, added some amazing features such as making FireHydrant Runbooks even more powerful with conditions, and great integrations, which you can find here. But even better, we got to work with all of you!

Moving full speed ahead into 2021, a year that is slated to be marked by unpredictability, fast-paced change, and (still) a lot of disruption – no organization can afford to allow such disorder to impact productivity, operations, and the business overall.

The pandemic has accelerated digital business initiatives. Ultimately, it’s the application that delivers new capabilities to customers and employees; but transformation occurs at several layers to support those applications. At VMware, we see our customers navigating three transformations, each of which supports digital business and app modernization at different levels.

App modernization has played an outsize role in many organizations’ digital transformation journeys throughout 2020. In fact, 70 percent of IT leaders indicated that they’ve prioritized app modernization efforts because of the pandemic, according to a September 2020 thought leadership paper commissioned by VMware in which Forrester Consulting surveyed more than 200 global enterprise CIOs and SVPs of IT.

As enterprises prioritize application modernization initiatives, moving rapidly to adopt containers and cloud native patterns, VMware is pleased to announce the availability of VMware Tanzu Advanced edition. VMware Tanzu Advanced meets the moment. It simplifies and secures the container lifecycle, enabling teams to accelerate the delivery of modern applications across multiple clouds—a real DevSecOps approach.

Assuring the security of PostgreSQL and all open source database systems is critical as many learned with the PgMiner botnet attacks in December 2020. Having an understanding of, and visibility into, how these attacks happen and following standard best practices is the best way to make sure that your data is not at risk. This blog details the latest security issue with PostgreSQL, how to fix/prevent these attacks and how to ensure security of your PostgreSQL database instances.

When developing applications for Kubernetes, which is a distributed system, developers and platform engineers need to know both how to monitor them and understand how they impact their business. There are several tools available to instrument Kubernetes clusters and code, but figuring out which options are the right ones can be challenging. That’s why we created the Introduction to Observability course on KubeAcademy.

Delivering great software and sustainable systems is a team sport. Without the support of all stakeholders, adoption initiatives often fail. In successful initiatives, SREs are responsible for bringing together all resources and team members to help resolve reliability-related issues. But getting together these resources takes much more effort than people think. SREs engage in lots of glue work to ensure these collaborative efforts happen.

In this article, we are going to see how we can integrate Google Cloud with Grafana. We will integrate Google Cloud SQL with Grafana and plot the metrics on Grafana. We will also look at how we can use Google Stackdriver as the data source in Grafana to expose the metrics of Google Cloud VM’s and platforms. To use Grafana immediately, we will be using Hosted Grafana by MetricFire.