Do More With Less

March 13, 2023 | By Shadow-Soft Team

Doing “more with less” is a chronic problem for IT professionals. But it’s gotten worse. And it’s not just Amazon, Meta, Oracle, and Microsoft that are downsizing. Your company probably has a resource shortage too. Research from Qualtrics shows the…

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What Is Digital Transformation?

February 20, 2023 | By Shadow-Soft Team

  Too often IT is asked for “Digital Transformation” or building capabilities at a “Moment of Truth” or creating an “Omnichannel 360° Customer View.” That sounds great, but what does that mean? And who can do all that? McKinsey &…

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Why NeuVector Trumps Traditional Intrusion Detection System (IDS) in Kubernetes

February 3, 2023 | By Derrick Sutherland

Kubernetes is quickly becoming the go-to platform for container orchestration, and for a good reason. It allows organizations to deploy, scale, and manage containerized applications in a highly-available and resilient manner. However, as Kubernetes becomes more widely adopted, it’s important…

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Custom Vault Integrations: Rust

January 10, 2023 | By Matthew Schuchard

Introduction Hashicorp’s Vault has become the industry standard tool for secrets management. It comes packaged with multiple solutions for engines supporting various authentication methods, secret integrations, and storage. However, not every application has a first-party, third-party, or community secrets engine…

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Packer: Secret Features Revealed

January 4, 2023 | By Matthew Schuchard

Introduction After the release of version 1.8.0, Packer entered a maintenance and upkeep mode where the primary objectives were major bugs, and new features and medium or lower bugs are triaged. Part of this goal re-alignment means that multiple new…

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Conquering Application Performance Monitoring with Dynatrace

October 19, 2022 | By James Rouse

It’s an oh-so-familiar scenario. Your organization is embracing a “cloud first” initiative, and you are part of the engineering team that is responsible for supporting the new hybrid environment.  It’s Friday afternoon; you’re heading home, and you are hoping for…

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What is Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization?

August 24, 2022 | By Nick Marcarelli

Openshift Virtualization is an add-on to the OpenShift platform that allows you to run and manage virtual machine workloads alongside container workloads.  Benefits  OpenShift Virtualization lets customers modernize existing applications and services to Red Hat OpenShift OpenShift Virtualization allows users…

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Local Kubernetes Lab: Quick and Easy

August 1, 2022 | By Matthew Schuchard

Introduction At the end of 2017 Kubernetes had won the container orchestration wars. Rival container orchestration platforms had transitioned to instead providing managed service offerings of Kubernetes. There were and are multiple powerful and enterprise offerings for this functionality. However,…

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How do you evaluate emerging technology?

July 8, 2022 | By Nick Marcarelli

I asked an IT leader how they evaluate emerging technology for use within their organization. The response was interesting. The internet – Google, Reddit, LinkedIn Direct with an independent software vendor Referrals from colleagues or friends Gartner Trial and error…

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Packer Image Pipelines

July 5, 2022 | By Matthew Schuchard

Introduction Packer is the industry standard tool for managing machine image artifacts. It is also essentially the “only game in town”. It supports a variety of platforms and provisioners for sophisticated management of various sources and builds using HCL2, and…

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Terraform Dynamic Ansible Inventory Management

June 17, 2022 | By Matthew Schuchard

The typical workflow design pattern for server provisioning is to create instance image artifacts, and then provision infrastructure, and then provision software and configuration unique to the instance. There may also be a desire to independently update and modify the…

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Alternative CI Pipeline Tools Comparison

June 7, 2022 | By Matthew Schuchard

Introduction I can still recall with clarity from over a decade ago when one of my job responsibilities was ensuring the source control management, building, packaging, quality assurance, delivery, and release of an enormous monolithic software tool suite comprised of…

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Ansible and Puppet Orchestration: A Comparison

May 27, 2022 | By Matthew Schuchard

Introduction In August of 2005, Luke Kanies created Puppet because he was tired of remembering how the different package management systems worked, and wanted to unify them into a single interface. In February of 2012, Michael DeHaan created Ansible as…

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Kubernetes Scheduler Algorithm Combinatorial Modeling

May 24, 2022 | By Matthew Schuchard

Introduction Most people familiar with the Kubernetes scheduler algorithm are aware of the basic mathematical concepts around its logic. Anyone who has also pursued an interest in learning about it at a low level is aware of its relation to…

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DIY Vault Backup

May 19, 2022 | By Matthew Schuchard

Introduction Hashicorp’s Vault is the industry standard for secrets management. In version 1.4 of Vault, the integrated storage backend supplied by Raft was promoted from beta to general availability. This Raft integrated storage backend has replaced Consul as the default…

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QA Migration to Kubernetes in 1.5 Weeks: Then and Now

April 18, 2022 | By Matthew Schuchard

Introduction Recently I was asked once again to build out Kubernetes cluster infrastructure, and deploy and configure supporting software, and then migrate a client’s QA environment and applications to the cluster. This was all to be completed in a week…

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Terraform Config for Multi-Cloud: Solution

March 10, 2022 | By Matthew Schuchard

Introduction Terraform is the industry standard tool for infrastructure provisioning. It provides a unified language for interacting with any supported API. This enables developers to interact with a variety of platforms via knowledge of Terraform, and some measure of knowledge…

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Terraform Config for Multi-Cloud: Problem

March 8, 2022 | By Matthew Schuchard

Introduction Terraform is the industry standard tool for infrastructure provisioning. It provides a unified language for interacting with any supported API. This enables developers to interact with a variety of platforms via knowledge of Terraform, and some measure of knowledge…

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Get started with Kubernetes for the price of a Ford Bronco

February 17, 2022 | By Nick Marcarelli

IT has arrived as an essential expenditure to producing revenue for an organization. Almost everything is a software expenditure. We buy hardware to run applications that run our businesses. We invest in the cloud as an alternative to run applications…

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Custom Vault Integrations: C++ (Bonus)

February 10, 2022 | By Matthew Schuchard

Introduction Hashicorp’s Vault has become the industry standard tool for secrets management. It comes packaged with multiple solutions for engines supporting various authentication methods, secrets integrations, and storage. However, not every application has a first-party, third-party, or community secrets engine…

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Custom Vault Integrations: Javascript

January 31, 2022 | By Matthew Schuchard

Introduction Hashicorp’s Vault has become the industry standard tool for secrets management. It comes packaged with multiple solutions for engines supporting various authentication methods, secrets integrations, and storage. However, not every application has a first-party, third-party, or community secrets engine…

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Custom Vault Integrations: Python

January 28, 2022 | By Matthew Schuchard

Introduction Hashicorp’s Vault has become the industry standard tool for secrets management. It comes packaged with multiple solutions for engines supporting various authentication methods, secrets integrations, and storage. However, not every application has a first-party, third-party, or community secrets engine…

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Custom Vault Integrations: Ruby

January 18, 2022 | By Matthew Schuchard

Introduction Hashicorp’s Vault has become the industry standard tool for secrets management. It comes packaged with multiple solutions for engines supporting various authentication methods, secrets integrations, and storage. However, not every application has a first-party, third-party, or community secrets engine…

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Custom Vault Integrations: Go

January 13, 2022 | By Matthew Schuchard

Introduction Hashicorp’s Vault has become the industry standard tool for secrets management. It comes packaged with multiple solutions for engines supporting various authentication methods, secrets integrations, and storage. However, not every application has a first-party, third-party, or community secrets engine…

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Shadow-Soft Achieves Record Revenues Driven by Kubernetes Deployments

March 8, 2023 | By Ross Beard

Shadow-Soft, Kubernetes systems integrator, announces record revenues for 2022, driven by Kubernetes deployments in manufacturing, logistics, retail, and finance. ATLANTA, GA, UNITED STATES, March 8, 2023 — Shadow-Soft, a leading Kubernetes systems integrator and founder of Kubernetes Academy, is pleased to…

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Episode 29: Solving the Kubernetes Talent Shortage

March 1, 2023 | By KC Chrimes

  Attracting Kubernetes talent is hard but not impossible. In this episode, Ross Beard returns to the podcast to turn the tables on host Nick Marcarelli. We discuss ideas on why there’s a Kubernetes skills shortage and learn about some…

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