A multi-cloud strategy has become the status quo for many organisations. It provides access to the broadest range of cloud services and best-of-breed technologies, along with a reduced risk of vendor lock-in. As a result, most organisations will use a number of the most popular service options alongside more niche or localised offerings.

Multi cloud has long been a contentious topic when you talk about cloud infrastructure. Infrastructure as code tools such as Terraform and Pulumi have made deploying to any cloud much easier - you can now use a single interface to deploy infrastructure to virtually any cloud environment. However, the effort of creating infrastructure for each cloud provider still requires significant expertise and time to get right, leading many to see it as a effort not worth taking.

Docker is the industry leader in the world of containerization. While the concept of containers is not new, still, it was not easy to create new containers. The underlying operating system complexities of creating a container were very challenging. Docker changed that and made things easier by handling the complexities mentioned above to launch a container. It's now super easy for developers to build, manage, scale and deploy their applications securely using Docker.

Kubernetes is today’s leading container management platform, due to its comprehensive API and developer-friendly features. Using Kubernetes, you can create scalable and reliable applications that run on-premises systems and public clouds. Its out-of-the-box features allow it to distribute hundreds of instances over data centers and keep them up and running. In order to catch up with the automation level of Kubernetes, developing and deploying applications requires more autonomy.

Enterprises spent US$178 billion on cloud infrastructure services in 2021, 37% more than in 2020. And “global spending on cloud services is expected to reach over US$482 billion in 2022.” Clearly the use of cloud services is on the rise. But what are cloud services exactly, and why are they beneficial? Cloud services are infrastructure, platforms, or software that are hosted by third-party providers and made available to users through the internet.

PlanetScale is a serverless, MySQL-compatible database platform powered by Vitess. PlanetScale handles database scaling while also providing you with the tools to increase your development velocity, such as branching, non-blocking schema changes, automatic backups, built-in connection pooling, as well as a helpful interface and CLI. Datadog’s new integration gives you deep visibility into your PlanetScale databases, so you can optimize your usage and costs.

Linux Active Directory integration is one of the most popular and requested topics from both the community and our clients. On May 17 we delivered a webinar on the new AD integration features introduced with 22.04 (now available on demand) and following that we received an overwhelming number of questions. In this blog post we would like to address directly the most frequent ones

Welcome to Part II of this three-part mini-series on embedded Linux development on Ubuntu. In Part I, we set the stage for the remainder of the series and gave an overview of snaps, the packaging format at the heart of embedded devices running Ubuntu. Snaps are a secure, confined, dependency-free, cross-platform Linux packaging format. Software publishers often want to manage their application components using containers.

So far in this series, you have learned why it’s important to understand how to use the command line, some command line basics and shell commands, and all about running CLI-based applications and command line tools. In this part of our CLI intro series, you are going to learn the basics of customizing your shell user experience. In this part of the CLI intro series, we’re going to focus on.