Blog

There are many services and tools to help manage microservices. This post looks at some options to highlight the similarities, differences, and when or why to use one.

Welcome to 2022 🥳 and a year that already promises to be as lively and active for Observability.

Docs as code is an increasingly popular approach for tech writers that follows similar principles for writing that developers follow for writing code. Docs as code typically means writing in markup languages such as markdown, asciidoc, or restructured text. The tools for writing in these markup languages are different from the specialized technical writing tools you might have used before, and again, are often designed for coding or general writing. This post looks at some of the best you can tr...

2021 was a difficult year for many. That's not to say that 2020 was any better, but for some reason, perhaps due to the "naivety" of the whole situation, it felt... "different". I certainly felt more prepared and willing to face new challenges and to learn how to adapt. Either way, I spent a long period of the 2020/2021 winter lockdowns trying to be as supportive and as positive to those around me as possible. I was active in online communities, helped friends and others out, supported them thr...

The discussions on what represents negative, biased, and diverse language continue in many open source communities, often sparking heated and strongly opinionated debate. Setting those discussions aside, say you have decided what language you want to increase, decrease, or change in your community. How do you enforce and track those changes?

“DevOps” merges Development and Operations team functions through practices and tooling, all the while making continuous improvements to applications. Teams that adopt DevOps tools, culture and practices perform better and build faster. Let’s walk through each stage of DevOps and the popular DevOps tools you may want to consider in 2022.

I am one of those rare and crazy people that owned the one and only [Essential phone](https://www.gsmarena.com/_essential_ph_1-8710.php). And I loved it. It was just the right size for me, devoid of excessive branding, almost pure Android, and a conversation starter as most people wondered what it was. But I am an unashamed nerd and didn't like having a phone that was no longer supported, and despite my best efforts, I couldn't get [LineageOS](https://lineageos.org/) to work. I bought a [OnePlus Nord](https://www.gsmarena.com/oneplus_nord-10289.php) and donated the Essential phone to my partner, who gets most of my technic...

This Weekend I have been thinking about excellence, or what does it mean to be truly an expert in something? Someone that others witness at their craft and think... > "Wow, they really know what they're doing!"

As big Kubernetes users ourselves, we know that one of the best ways to run Kubernetes is to use Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Earlier this year, Google Cloud announced a new mode for running GKE called Autopilot. Google Cloud designed Autopilot to reduce the operational cost of managing clusters, optimize clusters for production, and yield higher workload availability. Autopilot takes a lot of the legwork and complexity out of managing Kubernetes clusters, saving you time and money. But, like...

I have been trialing a handful of tools and processes recently building towards helping with this and now I have a shiny new M1 Pro laptop it seemed a perfect time to see how useful they were. Here's what I wanted to test and how the process went.

You want to migrate data to a new Mac but are also interested in using a clean install instead of restoring from a backup to remove any of that unnecessary crud that gathers, especially when you someone like me who constantly installs and uninstalls applications and tools. I have been trialing a handful of tools and processes recently building towards helping with this and now I have a shiny new M1 Pro laptop it seemed a perfect time to see how useful they were. Here’s what I wanted to test and...

For Nanowrimo (national novel writing month) 2021 I continued my novel from last year. To remind anyone who hasn’t followed my sparse updates on the novel, the novel is a speculative fiction set after a global zombie and human conflict where the two (let’s call them) species coexist in a tense harmony. For Nanowrimo this year, I set myself two targets.

One of the most important capabilities of an observability platform is alerting. How quickly can you know when something is wrong, so you can rapidly triage and remediate that problem? Chronosphere recently released a new approach to defining alerts called “Monitors,” which gives users more flexibility with alerts and makes them easier to create and manage. An alert is only useful if it’s seen quickly and by the right on-call team, and that’s where PagerDuty comes in. Many of our customers use C...

As conference season slowly draws to a close, and we fill that few months between the end of summer and the start of the seemingly never-ending holiday season (hemisphere and region-dependent naturally), there has been a flurry of activity in the observability ecosystem, so it’s time to, err, cast an eye over it 😬.

Humanitec provides an API-first way to build your Internal Developer Platform to enable developer environment self-service. This post shows how to use that API with Postman collections to make creating environments even easier.

I endlessly discover cool digital tools, apps, and websites for enhancing board games and roleplay games and needed an excuse to try them. So I wrote a blogpost! I am aware that some tools overlap categories, and in those cases, I have tried to put them in a category that makes the most sense. ## A living guide - I am fully aware that I will continuously discover more and more tools I can add to this list. So check back regularly for updates. - I will also attempt to convert this list to othe...

Distributed tracing tools help you track a request through an application or system that consists of multiple applications, services, and infrastructure. This gives you a deeper understanding of what is happening within the system through graphical representations of how much time the request took on each step. A span is the building block of any distributed trace, with each component in a service contributing a span to the distributed workflow. There are a handful of well known open source tra...

Nestled amongst the port of Hamburg, the sound of cranes loading containers of a different kind onto vast cavernous ships, I’m at my first in-person conference in about 18 months. It’s taking place on an old cargo ship, the HMS Bleichen (German), a ship obsoleted by the arrival of containerization and now home to talks about containers of a different kind.

I’ve been running podcasts for years, and while I worked on some video courses in the past, over the past year I have invested more time in my audio and video setup, primarily for live-streaming. After months and months of getting It to a point where I am “kind of” happy with it, I thought it was high time I documented it. Partly so others can learn from my setup, and partly so I can keep tabs on it myself. ## Disclaimer I spend a lot of time on making videos, and some of the product links her...

Want a powerful, self-hosted personal cloud? Then look no further than Nextcloud running on Kubernetes with a service mesh to add all the help and features you need.

How did you enjoy the first installment of this regular look back at a month in observability? Well, it’s back again, and as August and vacations draw to a close, the amount of news and content to tell you about is increasing. It’s time to get started, and as always, get in touch if you have stories for inclusion.

Welcome to the first installment of a monthly look back at the latest news in observability and the related cloud-native landscape. If you have any stories you think are worth considering, get in touch.

Metrics and managing and understanding them is an essential part of any modern complex application. As with any active and busy technical ecosystem, there is a proliferation of competing open source monitoring standards. A handful emerges as the most popular solutions. Slowly, the community creates a standard that most projects follow in some way.

Companies that are built upon or are building software typically want to move fast and not break things. But how can growing teams allow developers to keep building new features and fixing bugs without operations teams slowing them down with complex and arduous processes?

If you need to reduce the amount of metrics data stored in your time series database (TSDB) or improve query performance, there are generally two common methods to do so.

For metrics stored within Prometheus, the Prometheus Querying Language (PromQL) is the main way to query and retrieve the results you are looking for. Chronosphere supports querying metrics data using PromQL and Graphite functions, but as PromQL is the most popular option we see customers use. PromQL has some differences to other query languages you might have used. Here is an overview guide to get you started.

As many large-scale events start to feel they’re close to “getting back to normal,” this year’s KubeCon EU was the second online, and while it lacked any large announcements, there was plenty of consolidation and maturing of concepts.

Software development practices change fast. Development teams use an endless stream of new tools, frameworks, and practices, and it’s your job as a test engineer to make sure that no matter what your development teams use or create, everything runs and works reliably. How do you keep up to date with what’s relevant to your role and with what the developers around you are using that might affect your role? There are lots of articles out there, but sometimes a good podcast can't be beat. You can...

GitOps takes familiar tools such as Git and Continuous Delivery pipelines to automate infrastructure. The GitOps approach is vendor-neutral, provides a clear history of changes, and allows you to reproduce or roll back deployments. Yet, we can't ignore the problems with this approach: Proliferation of repositories, no help for secrets management, or simultaneous file writes. Let's explore.

How can playing roleplaying games help development teams work together better? Chris speaks with Karthik Nagarajan to find out.