Design

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  • 6 min

Building A Kubernetes Platform: How And Why To Apply Governance And Policy

A Platform, sometimes called an “internal developer platform,” is a unified infrastructure that allows development teams in a company to deliver applications rapidly and consistently. Out of the box, Kubernetes is a very powerful platform, but it’s too complicated and feature-rich to put in front of development teams as an internal developer platform without having some guardrails in place. Kubernetes is a perfect foundation for building a platform, however. It offers platform engineers many tools that allow them to provide developers with a more streamlined and safe approach to running applications. So, how do you build a platform that offers a great…
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  • 3 min

Amazing Federated Multicloud Apps

Applications that span multiple public clouds are becoming more popular, especially with Kubernetes and containers, but think carefully. These days I hear a lot about the goal to run federated applications across cloud providers. We want to build these multicloud applications for many reasons, including: How to run federated applications Although there are many ways to do federated deployment of applications, let’s focus on the most popular: Kubernetes. You typically set up a Kubernetes container cluster that spans multiple cloud providers. This creates several choices. You can use Kubernetes Federation to manage multiple Kubernetes clusters across different clouds as a…
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  • 5 min

Four Steps To Managing Your Cloud Logging Costs On A Budget

As part of our ongoing series on cost management for observability data in Google Cloud, we’re going to share four steps for getting the most out of your logs while on a budget. While we’ll focus on optimizing your costs within Google Cloud, we’ve found that this works with customers with infrastructure and logs on prem and in other clouds as well. Step 1: Analyze your current spending on logging tools To get started, create an itemized list of what volume of data is going where and what it costs. We’ll start with the billing report and the obvious line…
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  • 4 min

Kubernetes Costs Less, But Less Than What?

Sure, compared to traditional IT, Kubernetes is great, but not much will beat public cloud in the long run. Let’s start with some gospel: In IT, there is no gospel. No definite “thou shalts” that always apply, 100% of the time. Thus spake Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO: “Building evolvable software systems is a strategy, not a religion. And revisiting your architectures with an open mind is a must.” This goes for all smart IT strategies. The right answer for a given team in a certain circumstance won’t necessarily apply to another team in a slightly different circumstance. “It depends” is the only…
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  • 4 min

Multi-Cloud, Still An Actual Thing After All These Years

The 2023 edition of VMware’s annual State of Kubernetes report is now out, and it’s got a lot of great information about how organizations are using Kubernetes today, as well as the benefits and challenges that go along with that. In this blog post, I’m focusing on one area: multi-cloud. The concept of going multi-cloud is less contentious than it used to be, now that more and more non-tech enterprises are using lots of public clouds. Whether intentionally or through years of siloed departments and company acquisitions, large organizations tend to run their applications on many different types of infrastructure and clouds.…
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  • 4 min

5 Open Ways To Help UX Designers And Developers Collaborate Better

Designing with open decisions can help increase collaboration between user experience and dev teams. Ideally, designers have a good relationship with their product team and users. However, the relationship between designers and developers is more difficult to build and maintain. The lack of a close relationship makes it difficult to solve problems or improve. In my experience, the open source Open Decision Framework can overcome many of these obstacles. The Open Decision Framework asserts that open decision-making is transparent, inclusive, and customer-centric. It involves clearly sharing problems, requirements, and constraints with affected parties. It enables collaboration with multiple stakeholders to secure diverse opinions and comprehensive…
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  • 8 min

How To Get Started With Event-Driven Microservices

Event-driven microservices are an excellent way to deliver both historical and new data to all of the systems and teams that need it, but they come with additional overhead and management requirements. Start small. Many organizations reach a stage in their growth where the monolithic applications that once served them well start to hold them back. Perhaps the business needs new functionality that the existing architecture can’t support, or more flexible ways to store and access data for their apps. Team growth, conflicting performance requirements, and new competitive technologies can also pose a challenge to a singular, monolithic codebase. Adopting…
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  • 4 min

How Google And Intel Make Confidential Computing More Secure

Confidential Computing has quickly emerged as a critical technology to ensure confidentiality and security of sensitive data while it’s being processed. It performs computation in a hardware isolated environment that is encrypted with keys managed by the processor and unavailable to the operator. These isolated environments help prevent unauthorized access or modification of applications and data while in use, thereby increasing the security assurances for organizations that manage sensitive and regulated data in public cloud infrastructure.  Raising the bar for Confidential Computing  Google is committed to ensuring Confidential Computing technology is as secure as possible before releasing products to customers.…
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  • 4 min

How To Succeed With Cloud Computing During An Economic Downturn

Many say to cut cloud spending in a slowing economy, but it’s not that simple. Use these strategic moves to position yourself to lead the recovery. I’m starting to see articles in the business press calling for a downturn in cloud spending since the economy is likely to slow down. I’m always a bit skeptical of predictions that if something bad is happening or will happen, then we need to do X and Y. In most cases this means layoffs ahead of the actual slowdown, and budget cuts that kill business momentum. If most companies are reacting this way, why shouldn’t we?  As…
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  • 4 min

Solving The Serverless Cloud Cost Conundrum

The CNCF 2022 Annual Cloud Native Survey reports a significant bump in serverless adoption. Enterprise cloud cost optimization practices must keep up to keep cloud spending in check. Serverless computing adoption soared in 2022, according to the 2022 CNCF Cloud Native Survey. With this growing popularity comes the potential risk of increasing cloud spending unless enterprises take a proactive approach to serverless costs through strategy, optimization, and monitoring. Here are some tips on how to prepare your development team to approach serverless cloud costs proactively and not reactively after your CFO opens the first cloud bill after your serverless project goes…
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