It’s highly likely that you’ve heard the term “design thinking” used in a business or product context this year. Telling your developers, your engineers, your company to apply “design thinking” to their projects is in vogue. But what exactly is “design thinking”? And how does it apply to today’s workforce and the modern business world?

Host choice and the process of identifying the right data center for your company’s web hosting needs is one of the most challenging but essential decisions that you’ll have to make. It will depend a bit on how important the web component of your company is, but, in the modern era, it is highly likely that web will play a huge part of your company’s operations.

Single Sign-On (SSO) is a valuable tool for enterprise companies managing multiple users across networks. Because user management becomes so difficult when dealing with hundreds or thousands of users, many companies use an advanced system like AWS to take care of it all.

Whether a team is one person or one hundred, automated testing uncovers issues in an application before the code is deployed to production. The earlier a problem is diagnosed, the cheaper and less impact it has on you (the developer) and the organization.

Five worthy reads is a regular column on five noteworthy items we’ve discovered while researching trending and timeless topics. This week, we explore how the agile philosophy can help organizations manage their operations.

How are you deploying your applications in 2019? Are you using containers yet? According to recent research over 80% of you are. If you are within this group, were you initially sold on the idea of containers but found that in reality, the complexity involved with this approach makes it a difficult trade-off to justify? The community is aware of this and has come up with a remedy to ease the pain, and it’s called container orchestration.

At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU in Barcelona, the Grafana Labs team delivered four well-received talks as well as a keynote in front of thousands of attendees. In case you missed the conference (or you want to watch the sessions again!), check out the links to our recap blog posts or watch the talks below.

CoreDNS is a DNS server that can also provide service discovery for microservice-based applications. It’s the default DNS server in Kubernetes, providing name resolution and service discovery for the services operating in the cluster. CoreDNS is easily customizable, so you can define how it should act on each request beyond simply executing a DNS lookup.

At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Barcelona last week, Weaveworks’ Bryan Boreham and I did a deep-dive session on Cortex, an OSS Apache-licensed CNCF Sandbox project. A horizontally scalable, highly available, long term storage for Prometheus, Cortex powers Grafana Cloud’s hosted Prometheus. During our talk, we focused on the steps that we’ve taken to make Cortex’s query performance awesome.