Flux7 Blog

In last week’s DevOps news, we shared several events that moved to a virtual format, offering free attendance. This week vendors follow suit. For example, Appian has made its application to track Coronavirus-related healthcare incidents free to companies with 1,000+ employees. And, Cisco commits $210 million in products along with $8 million in cash to help with Covid19. 

In related news, C3.ai, Microsoft Corporation, UC Berkeley, MIT, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), Princeton University, the University of Chicago, Carnegie Mellon, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at UIUC made two major announcements. First, the C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute research consortium will sponsor and fund a coordinated effort to advance the digital transformation of business, government, and society. And, it has issued a call for proposals to help stop COVID-19 — and future pandemics — using AI.

DevOps News

• Kubernetes brings Kubernetes 1.18 to market. Included in this “fit and finish” release: 
  • • Beta of Topology Manager and Serverside Apply 
    • Two additions to Ingress: A new pathType field and a new IngressClass resource. 
    • Alpha of kubectl alpha debug command that allows developers to debug Pods inside a cluster.
    • And, alpha of CSI Proxy for Windows. 
      

• HashiCorp introduces a beta release of HashiCorp Nomad 0.11. The Nomad workload orchestrator allows teams to deploy and manage containers and non-containerized apps. New Nomad 0.11 features include:
  • Extensible, pluggable storage volumes and autoscaling
  • Audit logging for greater visibility, operational traceability, and compliance requirements.
• In addition, HashiCorp Nomad 0.11 launches a Technical Preview of the HashiCorp Nomad Autoscaler. It is a new open source project that automatically scales workloads running on a Nomad cluster.
  
  
• RedHat OpenShift Serverless includes new features and functions to improve the Kubernetes developer experience. According to a blog announcement, the Serverless user experience integrates with other OpenShift services – e.g., OpenShift Pipelines, Monitoring and Metering. It also includes immutable revisions to deploy new features; portable serverless running anywhere OpenShift runs, and; the ability to use data locality and SaaS.
• GitLab releases GitLab 12.9. The newest version features the ability to use HashiCorp Vault to secrets at the project level. In addition, it gives users Customizable Value Stream Analytics, code quality reports, and the ability to manage deploy tokens in bulk more efficiently, and more.

AWS News 

• AWS announces a new Quick Start to deploy AWS Database Migration Service Automation Framework on the AWS Cloud. Taking about 30 minutes, AWS says the Quick Start is for users who: 
  • Separate AWS DMS migration tasks into full-load and change-data-capture phases
  • Require an automated code deployment framework with repeatability and customizability

• AWS releases the ability to remediate drift with AWS CloudFormation resource import. In its blog, AWS notes they combine drift detection and resource import features to help safely remediate some drift cases.  As you may know, drift detection compares your desired state against the resource’s actual state. When drift is detected, users can:
  • update the template to match the actual state
  • update the resource to match the desired state in your template
  • Use resource import to decouple the resource from the template. This option allows you to adopt updated property changes without executing a resource update.
    
  • Resource import and drift detection are available now.

• Amazon announces AWS Resource Groups support for AWS CloudFormation. Now users can create and organize resources with CloudFormation stack templates. 
• In addition, AWS CloudFormation now also supports AWS Transit Gateway Network Manager. Support includes templates to build global networks across the cloud and on-premises.
• Also, Amazon Managed Apache Cassandra Service now helps automate resource creation and management with AWS CloudFormation.
• Updates to Amazon EC2 allow users to attach IAM resource policies to their VPC endpoints. This update can help users meet compliance and regulatory requirements with policies for more fine-tuned access control to Amazon EC2 APIs.
• Our DevOps consulting team enjoyed this AWS tutorial. In it, the authors share an easy way to collect accounting information for evert job and step executed in a cluster with job scheduling. Enabling job accounting for HPC with AWS ParallelCluster and Amazon RDS.
  

Flux7 News

This week we featured two resources to help teams upskill and close the skills gap:

• What better time to close the skills gap than in the turns? Explore cloud, DevOps and container eConference opportunities to uplevel your skills with our round-up of Summits that have moved to a virtual conference format. Close the Skills Gap by Upskilling in the Curves: an eConference Roundup
• As events move from a traditional to virtual conference format, it’s important to have a strategy to gain the most from the event, before, during and after. Check out our Infographic with our tips. How to Get the Most from a Virtual Conference Experience 

Written by Flux7 Labs

Flux7, an NTT DATA Company, 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.