Service alarms are going off and you are on the hook to restore stability, but you need to prevent any more changes to production while you dig further. You could "freeze" production by announcing it in the office, sending a message on Slack, or sending an email to the affected teams, but that may not be enough or may require extra work that would distract you from debugging and fixing the problem.
Many of the available configuration management tools, such as Ansible, Terraform, Puppet, Chef, and Saltstack provide automation for infrastructure, cloud, compliance and security management, and integration for deployment and continuous deployment (CI / CD). But what is the best tool to start automating your particular environment? The difficult task of evaluating Configuration Management Tools prevents DevOps from evolving technically and proposing improvements to the environment they manage.
If you’re in enterprise IT, you’ve probably already looked into Microsoft’s Azure public cloud. Microsoft Azure offers excellent enterprise-grade features and tightly integrates with Office 365 and Active Directory. It also provides a managed Kubernetes service, AKS, that you can provision from the Azure portal.
While Kubernetes has been traditionally used with Linux workloads, the desire to run Windows applications is an important need for many organizations that have critical applications running on Windows Server. Docker has already offered support for native Windows containers, so the next missing piece would be Windows node support in Kubernetes clusters. Google Cloud has recognized this gap and is now offering Windows support for Kubernetes clusters.
One of the most critical metrics when it comes to the software delivery process is deployment frequency, which measures how often releases are happening in production. While in theory all organizations should strive to deploy as often as possible, in practice the benefits for frequent deployments are often overlooked or buried under endless technical debates.
In agile development, planning, coding, and builds are an ongoing loop. But when a circle is broken, you can’t travel it at full speed. For users of Atlassian Bitbucket Server and Jira, JFrog’s integrations can help Artifactory bridge the gaps for continuous velocity. In a previous blog post, we discussed how to provide Jira information as a critical “why” in your build information.
If you’ve done your research, you probably know that Kubernetes is only one piece of the puzzle. Production grade deployments require a lot of moving pieces including logging and monitoring, governance, and more. You’ll also need some key extensions — some Kubernetes can’t go without, others that will make your life a lot easier. Let’s take a closer look.
Among the updates that we ignore most are driver updates, and sometimes for good reason. There have been plenty of cases wherein a driver update caused more harm than good. This could be due to two reasons. One, the user blindly clicked the update without taking a minute to read what the update actually achieves, or two, the user was not equipped to understand what the update achieves. Whatever the reason, one thing is clear: we cannot leave the cybersecurity of an organization up to chance.
