Orchestration in an IT environment refers to the coordinated management of workflows, applications, and systems, with the primary goal to optimize business performance by streamlining processes. Using orchestration, IT administrators can automate, from a single console, a series of tasks to run at a defined time or interval. This includes automating IT tasks like provisioning of user accounts, as well as managing databases, incidents, applications, and cloud resources.

Containers are a useful tool for deploying applications because they allow for the packaging of an application’s code, libraries, and dependencies into a single, isolated unit. This makes it easy to deploy and run the application on any computer or server that has the necessary container software installed.

How do you create a great engineering team? Exclusively hire brilliant, tenured computer science PhDs. There we solved it. You can skip the next 400 words. (I can hear my college professor in my head saying “Humor might not be your strong suit”) Building a great engineering team isn’t easy. Understatement of the year. It’s not even a problem to be solved per se. We need to think about it as preparation to solve an infinite set of constantly evolving problems.

In December 2022, the latest version of HAProxy, 2.7.0, was released. This open-source software is both a proxy and a load balancer, and is immensely popular due to the sheer volume of features it provides to help reduce or even avoid downtime and manage web traffic. Website or application downtime is disastrous for businesses. You want to serve as many users as possible, but if you have nothing in place to manage traffic, then your web applications can quickly become overwhelmed and fail.

Have you ever patched your servers using scripts only to realize that you missed another script for pre-update configuration compliance that had to run beforehand? Most IT organizations start with scripting simple, repetitive tasks in either Python, PowerShell, or Perl to help provide the quickest ROI. Common pain points solved for are creating user accounts, installing patches, software, and provisioning resources such as virtual machines (VMs), etc.

As the cloud native environment becomes increasingly more complex, new systems are needed to combat this issue and create simplified, secure, and stable working environments. Sidero Labs developed Talos Linux as a way to run Kubernetes consistently across all platforms, such as Edge, Cloud, Virtual, and Bare Metal. Talos Linux is a secured Linux distribution designed specifically for managing Kubernetes.

Testing is a vital aspect of security. Unfortunately, there are vulnerabilities that bypass the testing stage and introduce flaws in the production environment. Kubernetes vulnerabilities make more impact when exploited on running applications and production environments. These vulnerabilities can allow hackers to exploit the host machine if the container has escalated privileges.

Reducing development and testing time is one of the top priorities for software development teams. A reduced development time allows teams to move ahead with projects faster and focus more on testing and refining them, which is especially important for end-user-based projects. This is because UI-UX-heavy projects often need to be put through a rigorous review and refinement process before they can finally be launched for customer use.

The main idea behind Kubernetes is to create a standardized approach to running containers in the cloud. Whether you’re running AKS on Azure or EKS on Amazon, your cluster should still behave in more or less the same way. But that’s not to say you’re locked in to doing things one way; Kubernetes still offers a lot of flexibility in many cases. This is what experienced engineers take advantage of when trying to optimize Kubernetes performance.

When shopping for something where all the choices look similar, the feeling of choice paralysis creeps over you. This can happen when shopping for electronics, computer parts, or a pair of shoes. Choice paralysis occurs when a person finds it very difficult and stressful to make a decision with the available information. Applying security patches in Linux is a relaxing and rewarding experience when you have confidence in your process.