If you are optimizing your current DevOps processes, we can help. We’ll explain the 7 key principles of DevOps and how to put them into practice.

Welcome to the Cloud 66 Changelog. These are the changes that have gone out this month.

Much has been written over the years about DevOps and, maybe a bit more recently, about Platform Engineering. Both jobs focus heavily on designing, building, maintaining, extending, and automating underlying infrastructure components (e.g., Kubernetes, monitoring, security, pipelines, etc.), so their end-users, often developers, can consume it as an integrated platform.

We at Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, are pleased to join hands with the Magma Foundation. Magma connects the world to a faster network by providing operators an open, flexible, and extendable mobile core network solution. Its simplicity and low-cost structure empower innovators to build mobile networks that were never imagined before. We decided to support this open source project because of our wider telco efforts.

At Canonical, we love Flutter and we can’t stop talking about it. Our Flutter developers have been working on bringing support to desktop operating systems since July 2020. This includes our new Ubuntu Desktop installer, built with Flutter, which will be the default user journey in our upcoming 22.04 LTS release.

Pricing for most Microsoft 365 (M365) and Office 365 (O365) suites are due to increase on 1 March 2022 by up to a whopping 25%, prompting many I&O leaders to assess their Microsoft cost optimization options before their next renewal. Microsoft first revealed the price increase on 19 August 2021, and are justifying the decision by making a wider set of features and services available, such as security, audio services or device/user management, regardless of whether they’re required.

Organizations throughout the globe have been working for years trying to find more efficient ways to remove the barriers hindering the speed at which computing services and applications are rolled out to market. These barriers often present challenges for how DevOps and monitoring work together. Between the requirements-and-design phase, to planning and development, to testing, software projects can take between 4 to 9 months to complete depending on their size and complexity.

HashiCorp Vault provides centralized storage and management of passwords, API keys, tokens, and other secrets that distributed applications can use to operate securely. Vault clients—services and applications that access secrets programmatically, as well as users who interact with a Vault server—can create, update, and read secrets based on the permissions you grant them.

Anyone who builds a lot of Argo workflows knows that after a while you end up reusing the same basic steps over and over again. While Argo Workflows has a great mechanism to prevent duplicate work, with templates, these templates have mostly stayed in people’s private repositories and haven’t been shared with the broader community.

Traditionally, provisioning an infrastructure meant a team of field engineers, system admins, storage admins, backup admins, and an application team would all provision and maintain an on-premises data center. Although this system works, it has a few flaws—slow deployment, high cost of setup and maintenance, limited automation, human error, inconsistency, and the underutilization of resources during off-peak periods.