Would you like to detect problems in your Amazon Redshift environments? Does your team need a high-level overview of what monitoring options they can choose from when they deploy Redshift nodes and clusters? First, we’ll start with one of the most important components of any monitoring strategy: performance and availability monitoring. Then, we’ll continue with monitoring Redshift configuration changes and …
There are always the kind of tasks that need to run periodically, either to analyze and process information (like fraud detection), or to simply do things like send email reports. But for that, we need to have a tool to schedule computer resources and, of course, the script. But what if we only need to worry about coding the script? Introducing AWS …
Over the last few years, people have increasingly been adopting containers. But to use containers at a large scale, you need to use an orchestrator to ease the administration of your applications. Kubernetes is the most popular orchestrator and, while there are many concepts you need to learn to make the most of it, the benefits of using Kubernetes are …
When you spend a long time building an app or website just to have users complain about latency issues, it is not fun. You don’t know where the problem lies, nor do you know the environment in which it occurred. So it gets ignored, and performance issues keep lingering, like a haunting memory. This not only wreaks havoc on the …
People who are new to hosting web apps on IIS (Internet Information Services) sometimes struggle with the concept of application pools. What is an IIS application pool? What purpose does it serve? In this post, we’ll answer these questions—and more. We’ll begin by offering a brief introduction to IIS itself. If you’re already well acquainted with this piece of software, …
Digitalization is sweeping across many industries, creating a huge need for innovation. This innovation forces companies to be more agile and deliver faster. However, increasing the speed of your development team doesn’t happen by magic. It’s a metric that isn’t easy to change. How can you adjust to this fast-paced digitalization? I want to introduce you to DevOps. DevOps helps …
Need help on how to monitor IIS? This guide covers the basics, including HTTP ping checks, IIS Application Pools, and important Windows Performance Counters. In addition, we’ll take a look at how to use an application performance management system to simplify monitoring IIS and get more advanced IIS performance monitoring for ASP.NET applications. Without monitoring IIS performance, you could end …
Being able to execute a SQL performance tuning is a vital skill for software teams that rely on relational databases. Vital isn’t the only adjective that we can apply to it, though. Rare also comes to mind, unfortunately. Many software professionals think that they can just leave all the RDBMS settings as they came by default. They’re wrong. Often, the …
So you want a faster application? If you’ve not heard of a flamegraph, it can be a great way to improve and gain insight into your application performance. Today, we’ll explain what a flamegraph is. We’ll cover the stack trace and its origin, the call stack. Finally, we’ll define the flame graph and show how to leverage it for improving …
AKS is the managed service from Azure for Kubernetes. When you create an AKS cluster, Azure creates and operates the Kubernetes control plane for you at no cost. The only thing you do as a user is to say how many worker nodes you’d like, plus other configurations we’ll see in this post. So, with that in mind, how can …
Everybody climb aboard the hype train with me. Today, we’re going to study a new job title: the DevOps engineer. This role is getting popular in the same way that the full-stack developer role became popular before it. In fact, one could argue that the DevOps engineer is an extension of the full-stack developer in that both seek to extend …
Docker is a powerful tool for creating and deploying applications. It simplifies rolling out applications across multiple systems and is a useful tool for integrating new technologies. An application that runs using Docker will start up the same every time on every system. This means that if the application works on your local computer, it’ll work anywhere that supports Docker. …
Docker is now everywhere. Over the past few years, a lot of modern-day software has now moved to become packaged in a Docker container, and with good reason. One of the biggest benefits touted about Docker containers is their speed. You don’t get lightning-fast performance out of the box without Docker performance tuning. We’re going to discuss some of the tips and …
DevOps is no longer just about breaking the silo between developers and operations. That’s why every manual operation in your delivery pipeline needs to be evaluated to determine if it can be automated. Database changes are indeed a tedious process and therefore deserve to be considered in your DevOps implementation. Let me pause a moment to temper your expectations for …
Azure has plenty of services for hosting your applications and their components. It also has extensive options for deploying to these services. Barry Luijbregts introduces four of the primary options for hosting apps in his article, “Which Azure Deployment Model Should You Use? 4 Ways to Deploy.” In that post, Luijbregts covers where to deploy on Azure; in this post, I’m …
Kubernetes, the container orchestration tool originally developed by Google, has become a vital resource for Agile and DevOps teams. As an open source tool, Kubernetes is becoming an ecosystem in itself, with other tools being developed to support it. Some of these extensions are coming straight from Kubernetes, while others are open source projects in their own right. Kubernetes provides …
Containers reshaped efficient software development, allowing dev teams to isolate apps in special solo environments on multiple operating systems. As container tools like Docker become more popular, logical container management has become the next workflow challenge for DevOps teams. That’s why more dev teams are turning to Kubernetes to manage their production-grade containers. Designed with the same principles that allow …
_ How do you test that a feature in your application actually works? Or that it is actually being used? Usually, you’d perform lots of tests in separate environments, like a QA or Acceptance environment. Or you’d route a certain percentage of your production traffic to the new version of your site to test if and how usage of your new …
In order to release quickly and have stable application environments with minimal errors, it is of vital importance that developers work well with IT operations people and vice versa. To do this, they need to communicate well and sometimes work in the same team. Ideally, they work in the same environment. Makes sense right? This is called DevOps. DevOps is …
In 20 years, we will look back at the 2010’s as a time of massive development reformation. The late 18th century had the Industrial Revolution, we have the Development Revolution. Lean, lightweight, and rapid development and deployments have taken over the way we look at software development– and for good reason. It’s no longer viable to spend a year working …
