It's easy to get lost in today's continuously changing landscape of cloud native technologies. The learning curve from a beginner's perspective is quite steep, and without proper context it becomes increasingly difficult to sift through all the buzzwords. If you have been developing software, chances are you may have heard of Kubernetes by now. Before we jump into what Kubernetes is, it's essential to familiarize ourselves with containerization and how it came about.

The enterprise Kubernetes management space has definitely become a lot more crowded over the past two years as traditional vendors and startups alike attempt to grab a slice of this massive market. The increasingly competitive vendor landscape makes Forrester’s recent recognition of Rancher Labs that much more meaningful.

We have come a long way in the world of computing. From having computers that fill up entire rooms or buildings while performing relatively basic actions to having complex machines that literally fit in our pockets and palms, this advancement has been nothing short of breathless. With an emphasis placed on speed and efficiency, computers and the applications running on these computers have been tailored to ensure optimal use of resources, be these resources hardware or software resources.

Here at CloudZero, we’ve made some updates to our dashboard that we’re excited to share with you! I actually prefer this original definition. When you hear the word dashboard, if you’re not thinking about software, you’re probably picturing the place in a car where you have various dials and readouts for safe operation of the vehicle. But did you know what the term dashboard predates cars?

One of the defining features of snaps is their strong security. Snaps are designed to run isolated from the underlying system, with granular control and access to specific resources made possible through a mechanism of interfaces. Think of it as a virtual USB cable – an interface connects a plug with a slot. Security and privacy conscious users will certainly be interested in knowing more about their snaps – what they can do and which resources they need at runtime.

Maintaining legacy applications can be an affliction that saps up energy, time, and resources. Application modernization remains fashionable and involves refactoring, re-purposing, or consolidating legacy software to align it more closely with current business needs and add business value. Traditional methods for modernizing applications include rewriting existing application code to a more modern programming language to salvage parts of the application that might still have value.

We recently announced four new VMware Tanzu editions, each of which packages capabilities of the Tanzu portfolio into a solution that directly addresses a single, common customer challenge. Your effort to modernize applications is already complex. Tanzu editions simplify your access to the tools you’ll need to move forward. Before walking through each of the four new editions, it’s important to first call out the characteristics that are common to all of them.

Many of us hate our backup environments. That’s because backups kind of suck, even with a backup product as great as IBM Spectrum Protect. As I said in another post, it’s the thing that everyone needs, but no one cares about, and most definitely can make your life crappy. Ask any backup admin, and I know they’ll agree. Go ahead; I’ll wait. Yep, they said the same thing, didn’t they?

AWS Step Functions is a service that abstracts distributed applications into state machines, with each state representing a component of an application. Not only does this automatically generate an architectural diagram of your application’s workflow, it also makes it straightforward to reorder your states as well as implement parallel execution, retries, and other tasks.

A headline in a recent Register article jumped off my screen with the claim: “No, Kubernetes doesn’t make applications portable, say analysts. Good luck avoiding lock-in, too.” Well, that certainly got my attention…for a couple of reasons. First, the emphasis on an absolute claim was quite literally shouting at me. In my experience, absolutes are rare occurrences in software engineering. Second, it was nearly impossible to imagine what evidence this conclusion was based on.