IT Operations
Chaos engineering – practical resources to use in your next project
Chaos Engineering is well on its way to the top of the Garner Hype Cycle. Organizations as well as individuals pick this up as we speak. New initiatives, services, and tools emerge. Furthermore, cloud providers offer their Chaos Engineering-related services to attract IT professionals to extend the usage of their cloud platforms. So what's good to know to actually get started with this new trend? In this article, we'll explore various resources and topics...
How AIOps Fits into the DevOps Equation
DevOps teams have been ruthlessly automating processes for years but with the rise of machine learning algorithms it’s only a matter of time before artificial intelligence is applied to IT operations, otherwise known as AIOps. The issue heading into the New Year is determining what impact those platforms will have both near and long term on DevOps workflows and the overall management of IT.
AIOps platforms have been adopted with mixed success in the past...
Kubernetes is the answer. Now, what was the problem?
Over the last several years, an insidious technology has seeped into the Technosphere. Containerisation and the orchestration thereof by Kubernetes. For a large subsection of tech, the consumers of containers, the complexity has been successfully hidden. The Kubernetes solutions provided by the public cloud hyper-scalers - Azure, AWS and Google and, to a greater and lesser extent, the private cloud providers at first look appear easy to consume. Kubernetes seems very much to be...
Are you thinking about a Hybrid or Multi-Cloud Strategy, is DevOps your enabler framework of choice?
Two of the biggest Strategy buzzwords surrounding Technology rattling around in boardrooms and technical meeting rooms across the length and breadth of Europe are Multi-Cloud, and Hybrid-Cloud; these, together with the associated benefits, potential risks, issues, and constraints that any adoption could bring.
What is confusing about these terms is that, ostensibly, they mean the same thing; you house your resources and data in a most performant or economic location for the service; that may...
Log4JShell Anniversary Shines Spotlight on Incident Management Practices
It’s now been more than a year since the Log4j Shell vulnerability became, at least theoretically, a wake call for organizations that are dependent on software components built by others to revisit the security of their software supply chains. However, there has been less focus on modernizing the incident response processes that organizations rely on to remediate vulnerabilities. The trouble is it’s only a matter of time before the next great zero-day vulnerability crisis...
Effective webhooks and notifications to optimize your DevOps workflow
CI/CD and DevOps are all about the processing of automation steps to build and secure software applications. Various tools need to be integrated tightly to make sure all of these steps work fluently together. These integration points use Rest APIs to communicate back and forth. This is seen from a system-to-system perspective. The developer perspective seeks integration points between technical tools and their collaboration counterparts. These include tools like Slack, Github, MS Teams, or...
Hashicorp Vault as a CA – how to automate your Certificates part two
In the first article in this series, we spoke about Certificate Authorities (CA) and Certificates, their types and use-cases, and the operational pain points and challenges they present in keeping them up to date. We also introduced the concept of using HashiCorp’s Vault service to provide the ability to provide seamless auto-rotation of your certifications to prevent or lower the instances of Sev-One incidents due to expired or compromised certificates. In this, our second...
Hashicorp Vault as a CA – how to automate your certificates part one
I have been recently looking at one of the biggest pains to operational IT; PKI, Certification, and re-certification of resources. I bet you did not know that HashiCorp Vault can help with this?
But first a little back story about why Security is important in today's world filled with Ransomware, state-sponsored hacking and other nefarious methods of gaining control of systems for illegal purposes, Businesses have, by necessity, become untrusting. One of the favourite concepts...
These organizational challenges hamper your Cloud migration efforts
Often, companies who migrate their applications to the cloud focus heavily on the technical aspects. Due to the fact that the technical issues can be immense, they might ignore or underestimate the organizational challenges. Translating the vision to concrete projects and actions heavily depend on the organizational power to change. It's vital to understand which hurdles need to be addressed to make a smooth transition. These organizational challenges hamper your Cloud migration efforts.
No management...
Doing real work with Terraform Cloud – part 3
This is the third article in our series on Terraform Cloud; our first article, we introduced Terraform Cloud, explained the functions and features of the free tier, and went through the initial process of creating an account and connecting your new environment to your VSC of choice. The second article dug down deeper into Terraform Cloud and worked through the creation of our first workspace in preparation for doing real work.
This is the article where...