I remember how excited I was to build my first Network Operations Center (NOC). It was a new idea at the time (yes, I know I’m dating myself), and boy, did we feel like we were cutting edge. The mere idea that we needed a place and a set of tools to monitor our entire infrastructure (because it’s never really been about just the network) was a big transition at the time. How things have changed.

Kubernetes is the industry's most popular open-source platform for container orchestration. It helps you automate many tasks related to container management. Companies use it to solve their problems related to deployment, scalability, testing, management, etc. However, Kubernetes is complex and requires a steep learning curve. In this article, we will go through some common Kubernetes pitfalls most companies fall to.

Aiven has made life easier for Terraform users since 2017. Join us on a brief stroll down memory lane and learn how and why we got here.

While the cloud offers significant benefits compared to traditional on-premise infrastructure, its inherent elasticity and scalability lead to uncontrolled costs. Cloud costs can be opaque and difficult to analyze — and without some system of identifying the source of costs and how to manage them — they can quickly undermine your profit margins. Since Qovery makes it easy to create on-demand environments, it can drastically grow your cloud costs.

The past ten years marked a significant change in how software teams build and deploy applications. We moved away from bulky, slow, monolithic applications toward lightweight, scalable, distributed service-based applications. Meanwhile, tools like Docker, Kubernetes, and other container platforms helped accelerate this process. Despite this sudden growth, a fundamental question remains: what exactly is a service, and how does it fit into a microservice architecture?

When it comes to building reliable and scalable software, few organizations have as much authority and expertise as Google. Their Site Reliability Engineering Handbook, first published in 2016, details their practices to maintain reliability as Google scaled. But when you have over a million servers running thousands of services across more than twenty data centers, how do you monitor them in a consistent, logical, and relevant way?

With the right load balancing in place, the demand of increasing web traffic can become manageable, but how do you determine which load balancing algorithm is best suited for your applications? Does the ease of use of static load balancing better suit the services you provide, or would your system benefit from a more complex and dynamic set of algorithms to maximize efficiency? In this blog post, we discuss what to consider when deciding on the right load-balancing algorithm.

Legendary race car driver Carroll Smith once said, "until we have established reliability, there is no sense at all in wasting time trying to make the thing go faster." Even though he was referring to cars, the same goes for technology: no amount of code optimization or new features can replace stable systems. Unfortunately, much like race cars, it's hard to know that a system is unreliable until it blows a tire, the brakes stop working, or the steering wheel comes off the column.

Database performance is critical to business revenue. Slow and non-responsive databases can result in hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in lost revenue from poor customer experience and downtime. High expectations in performance require IT infrastructure to function at full speed. In 2006, an Amazon study found that every 100ms in added page load time cost them 1% in sales.

The Canonical Kubernetes team is delighted to announce that Canonical Kubernetes 1.25 is now generally available, with Charmed Kubernetes joining our Microk8s release last week, following the release of upstream Kubernetes on 23 August. We consistently follow the upstream release cadence to provide our users and customers with the latest improvements and fixes, together with security maintenance and enterprise support for Kubernetes on Ubuntu.