At some point, your startup will scale to the point that you need additional help building your product, and as the CTO, it’s up to you to find, hire, and onboard new software engineers. This process is intimidating because engineering hires are critical to the success or failure of your startup. In this series, we’ll talk about Blue Matador’s approach to the hiring process as well as the insights I’ve gained as CTO. This first post will cover when and who to hire.

Cycle’s API docs are live, and with it a whole new suite of tools to automate the management of containers across cloud providers. This is the same API that Cycle’s portal is built upon, meaning you have near full capability to do anything programmatically that you can do through the interface.

Five worthy reads is a regular column on five noteworthy items we’ve discovered while researching trending and timeless topics. This week, we delve into the increasing adoption of XaaS models across enterprises to achieve agility, pervasive automation, and digitization of business verticals.

If you run Microsoft’s Hyper-V as your virtualisation platform rather than the ever popular VMware ESX then you probably want a way to manage your Hyper-V hosts as well as the virtual machines that reside on this. Well you can do a lot of the functions that SCVMM does with the free tool for managing Hyper-V, the Hyper-V Manager (which comes as part of the Windows Operating System). System Centre Virtual Machine Manager is also called System Centre VMM or SCVMM for short.

DevOps enables developers and operations to work closely as a team throughout all phases of application development and production support. The catch? It's easier said than done.

We live in a containerized world, and traditional monitoring and logging are being forever changed. The dynamic and ephemeral nature of containers creates new logging challenges. Docker addresses these in some ways. Docker Engine provides various logging drivers that determine where logs are sent or written to. The default driver for Docker logs is “json-file,” which writes the logs to local files on the Docker host in json format.

Kubernetes has fundamentally changed the way we manage our production environments. The ability to quickly bring up infrastructure on demand is a beautiful thing, but along with it brings some complexity, especially when it comes to logging. Logging is always an important part of maintaining a solid running infrastructure, but even more so with Kubernetes. Because Kubernetes clusters are constantly being spun up, spun down, always in flux, making sure logging functions correctly is critical.

In the past I’ve written about how to use informers in Kubernetes for particular resources, but what if you need to be able to receive events for any Kubernetes resource dynamically? Well, there’s a client-go package for that too. At FireHydrant, we recently updated our Kubernetes integration to watch changes for any resource you configure and I wanted to write down how we made it at a high level.

There is a lot of pressure on enterprise IT to adopt cloud, and rightfully so. Most enterprises are moving toward multi-tenant, fully managed deployments, but most are seeing a careful, deliberate migration towards public cloud or hosted environments. Identifying and assessing challenges is the key point before taking any steps to modernize or migrate applications.

It’s been a few years since the “Spotify Model” became the latest trend for structuring an engineering team. But, like its predecessors, the model based on tribes and squads has some pitfalls. How to structure an engineering team is a question that’s been covered at length, from the strengths and weaknesses of common team structures to a matrix of organization based on risk and scale to why you should choose your own model.