Flux7 Blog

“Nearly 40% of public company technology leaders believe organizations will fail within three years if they don’t keep pace with digital innovation” blares the headline from a Kong press release in which the company announced results of its recent 2020 Digital Innovation Benchmark report. In addition to this revelation, Kong found that 84% of those surveyed have already adopted microservices, with the primary drivers including increased security (56%), faster speed of development (55%), the ability to more quickly integrate new technology (53%) and increased infrastructure flexibility (53%). .

DevOps News

• Kubernetes announced the delivery of Kubernetes 1.17. Highlights include: 

• • Cloud Provider Labels are now GA.
  • Volume Snapshot moves to beta, giving users a standard way to trigger snapshot operations in the Kubernetes API, without having to manually execute storage system specific operations.
  • Kubernetes in-tree storage plugin to Container Storage Interface (CSI) migration infrastructure is now beta as well. This feature enables the replacement of existing in-tree storage plugins such as kubernetes.io/gce-pd or kubernetes.io/aws-ebs with a corresponding CSI driver.

• HashiCorp announced the availability of Consul 1.7.0, its multi-cloud service networking platform. The release includes Namespaces, which remove restrictions around uniqueness of resource names across distinct teams and provide self-service through delegation of administrative privileges. In addition, users will now find GCP Snapshot Storage which allows Consul snapshots to be stored in GCP and AWS PCA as Certificate Authority for Consul. Release 1.7.0 is in beta now.

• In addition, HashiCorp announced it is preparing for the GA of a new product certification program for DevOps, IT, Security, and Development professionals. Now you can add formal, industry accepted credentials to your repertoire with tests for HashiCorp Terraform, Vault, Consul, and Nomad.

• HashiCorp has also brought us team visibility settings for Terraform Enterprise and Cloud. According to the announcement, these settings provide an improved workflow to delegate ownership of workspaces and manage access for specific teams. Now, all teams within Terraform Enterprise and Cloud have a ‘visibility’ setting which can be either Secret where only team members and organization owners can read a team and its membership; or, Visible where every user in the organization can see the team and its membership on the Teams page.

• Last, HashiCorp brought us the ability for policy as code workflows — within Terraform Cloud and Terraform Enterprise — to retrieve data from multiple business systems. Called Business-aware Policies, HashiCorp claims that organizations can now query information from other systems to determine if changes in infrastructure are compliant with company policy, approving those that are compliant, and automatically rejecting or escalating changes that are in breach of policy.

• Jenkins introduced AWS Secrets Manager Credentials Provider for Jenkins. The new service allows you to gather your secrets into one place, and use them securely from Jenkins. According to a blog announcement, users can define a secret just once for their whole AWS account, then give their consumers permission to use the secrets.  Secrets Manager lets users manage a secret entry (name and metadata) separately from its value, and it integrates with other AWS services such as AWS IAM, Amazon KMS, CloudWatch, and AWS CloudTrail.

• GitHub unveiled the public beta of IP Allow Lists for GitHub Enterprise Cloud customers. The new feature allows them to limit access to enterprise assets to an allowed set of source IPs.

• Our DevOps consulting team enjoyed this talk by Yevgeniy Brikman on how to write automated tests for infrastructure code: Automated Testing for Terraform, Docker, Packer, Kubernetes, and More. And, this Medium article by Julien Simon, A map for Machine Learning on AWS.
   

AWS News 

• AWS Systems Manager operators can now change their calendar to prevent changes happening during critical events, such as a new product launch. With AWS Systems Manager Change Calendar, a fully managed service, customers can create calendars and define important business events to ensure greater cross-team coordination.

Flux7 News

• AWS re:Invent was all consuming when it came to new product and service announcements. We followed the news closely in a three-part series. Here you can find all the news highlights from a week of AWS keynotes: 

• • Flux7 Reviews AWS re:Invent Announcements
  • AWS re:Invent News Round-Up Continued
  • 2019 AWS re:Invent and DevOps News Week in Review

• Don’t miss our blog, The Benefits of Monolith Refactoring, in which our HPC Solution Architect Derek Magill shares how to refactor to achieve the greatest advantages of using the cloud for near infinite scalability and elasticity.

Written by Flux7 Labs

Flux7 is the only Sherpa on the DevOps journey that assesses, designs, and teaches while implementing a holistic solution for its enterprise customers, thus giving its clients the skills needed to manage and expand on the technology moving forward. Not a reseller or an MSP, Flux7 recommendations are 100% focused on customer requirements and creating the most efficient infrastructure possible that automates operations, streamlines and enhances development, and supports specific business goals.