If you’re like most organizations, you’re leveraging Jenkins for all sorts of things. Deployment pipelines, automated API tests, even glorified CRON jobs just to name a few.

Happy New Year 2022! The fireworks are all fired, the champagne is over. It is time to get back to work. We are glad to see you here though. 2021 was a good year for OpenStack and its Ubuntu-based community. First, we all have seen Ubuntu becoming the number one operating system (OS) for OpenStack deployment. Then, the Open Infrastructure Foundation (OIF) reported explosive growth in the number of production OpenStack clouds. The community grew and settled on the most convenient platform.

The previous blog post talked about the composability of applications. The key element for composing applications is defining the relations between application elements. And supporting relations is one of the advantages of the Charmed Operator Framework – including its runtime, the Charmed Operator Lifecycle Manager.

SD-WAN is one of the fastest-growing segments of the network infrastructure market. Designed correctly, it will deliver unique advantages, enabling true digital transformation while reducing costs and management time and increasing application performance, availability, visibility and user experience. While the benefits of SD-WAN are obvious, we know it can often be a challenge to select the appropriate approach to design, implementation, and ongoing management.

An email recently came to our team (the Redgate Advocates) asking us what we thought the key challenges for data professionals might be in 2022. Kathi Kellenberger, Steve Jones and I each answered independently. We all bring different experiences and thoughts to the table, yet we all came up with three common themes. Here is what we all feel is likely to be of the most importance this year.

We talk about reliability a lot from the context of software engineering. We ask questions about service availability, or how important it is for specific users. But when organizations face outages, it becomes immediately obvious that the reliability of an online service or application is something that impacts the entire business with significant costs. A mindset of putting reliability first is a business imperative that all teams should share.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, employers are losing more than four million workers every single month. That, coupled with the record number of 11 million open jobs, has left businesses across the board scrambling to crack the code and find a way to not only attract top talent – but, more importantly – keep them from jumping ship at the next best opportunity.

As organizations progress in their reliability journey, they may build a dedicated team of site reliability engineers. This team can be structured in two major ways: a distributed model, where SREs are embedded in each project team, providing guidance and support for that team; and a centralized model, where one team provides infrastructure and processes for the entire organization.

Many of the multi-faceted applications development teams deploy every day are loosely coupled and every service exists to power another service. Most teams developing fullstack applications know that testing the communication between these services essential. Part of the process is testing HTTP request endpoints, and this tutorial focuses on exactly that. I will lead you through learning how to extend the k6 framework to test our HTTP endpoints.