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What is a hypervisor? A beginner's guide

In the realm of virtualisation and cloud computing, the hypervisor is a critical component that enables the seamless operation of multiple virtual machines (VMs) on a single host. While virtualisation is a technology, the hypervisor is its actual implementation. In this beginner’s guide, we will explore the fundamentals of hypervisors, their types, and how they differ from container runtimes. We will also review some of the leading hypervisors available today.

Top 5 Preview Environments Products to Consider in 2023

In the ever-evolving landscape of modern software development, where speed, quality, and collaboration are paramount, the concept of preview environments has gained significant traction. These virtual sandboxes serve as vital tools that empower developers to thoroughly test their code changes in isolated environments before integrating them into the main codebase. The advantages are multifaceted, ranging from reduced bugs to enhanced collaboration and accelerated software delivery.

Grafana vs. SolarWinds - The Dashboards

Dashboards are great ways to visualize different KPIs in a single place. Metrics from all over your system can be framed together and viewed on a single screen, helping to correlate them and reducing the overall effort of analysis. But when it comes to Grafana vs. SolarWinds, which one is better? It is often difficult to choose between their dashboarding capabilities. Both tools provide their own visualizations and help bring out interactive dashboards for users to use.

Top 10 End-to-End Testing Products for Web Applications in 2023

In the realm of software development and testing, end-to-end (E2E) testing plays a pivotal role in ensuring the robustness and reliability of web applications. Unlike unit or integration testing, which focuses on specific components or integrations between them, end-to-end testing evaluates the entire system as a whole. This includes testing the flow from the user's perspective, from start to finish, and often involves multiple systems and components working in unison.

How to secure your database

Cybersecurity threats are increasing in volume, complexity and impact. Yet, organisations struggle to counter these growing threats. Cyber attacks often intend to steal, damage, hijack or alter value-generating data. In this article around database security, we use the NIST framework to lay out the common controls that you can implement to secure your databases. Let’s start by discussing the potential impact of unsecured databases.

Authenticating Users with Google IAP in Rails

Google Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP) is a Google Cloud service that provides authentication for web applications. This service simplifies the process of building web applications authenticated with Google, eliminating the need to handle user-related concerns within your application code. This is especially valuable for internal applications within organizations that already utilize GSuite. It is straightforward to use, particularly when operating on Google Cloud.

Help reduce resource consumption: Put your preview environments on pause

With Platform.sh, every Git branch maps to a preview environment which is an exact and isolated copy of your live application—including all data, services, and files. They are usually created to build new features, apply security patches, or upgrade dependencies in full isolation and before deploying to production. Although there is a catch—preview environments are often left idle waiting for someone to review and approve any changes made.

The Top FP&A KPIs And How To Choose Yours

You know this by now. You can only improve an area of your business if you measure its health and performance. Yet, rather than collecting every general finance metric possible, you’ll want to plan, collect, and analyze the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that’ll drive strategic decision-making. That means KPIs are a subset of metrics that are most relevant to your goals as a team. Here’s how to leverage the right KPIs as an FP&A team.

Monitoring Kubernetes with Prometheus

In part I of this blog series, we understood that monitoring a Kubernetes cluster is a challenge that we can overcome if we use the right tools. We also understood that the default Kubernetes dashboard allows us to monitor the different resources running inside our cluster, but it is very basic. We suggested some tools and platforms like cAdvisor, Kube-state-metrics, Prometheus, Grafana, Kubewatch, Jaeger, and MetricFire.