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…
Read More →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 &…
Read More →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…
Read More →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…
Read More →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…
Read More →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…
Read More →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…
Read More →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,…
Read More →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…
Read More →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…
Read More →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…
Read More →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…
Read More →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…
Read More →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…
Read More →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…
Read More →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…
Read More →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…
Read More →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…
Read More →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…
Read More →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…
Read More →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…
Read More →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…
Read More →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…
Read More →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…
Read More →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…
Read More →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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