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• Ansible

  Ansible is an open source IT configuration management (CM) and automation platform, provided by Red Hat. Continue Reading

• Chef (software)

  Chef is an open source systems management and cloud infrastructure automation platform. Continue Reading

• Learn YAML through a personal example

  Some code languages take countless hours of formal training and practice. YAML strikes out in the opposite direction. To comprehend its hierarchical format, follow this coding example. Continue Reading

• Catch the IT automation technology wave

  IT automation is taking over in operations as tasks get bigger and more complex, handling distributed systems. Stay current with these five big trends. Continue Reading

• SaltStack

  SaltStack, often referred to as simply "Salt," is an open source configuration management and orchestration tool for automating repeated system administrative and code deployment tasks. Continue Reading

• Definitions to Get Started

  • Elastic Stack (ELK Stack)
  • virtual switch (vSwitch)
  • on-demand computing
  • AMD (Advanced Micro Devices)

  • host virtual machine (host VM)
  • Agile operations (AgileOps)
  • virtual appliance
  • physical to virtual (P2V)

  View All Definitions

• Ensure container monitoring and control via smart tooling

  Don't try to stick with traditional monitoring tools when your organization matures to containers; they won't do enough. Seek out monitoring and management tools with targeted capabilities.Continue Reading

• LXD (Linux container hypervisor)

  LXD is an open source container management extension for Linux Containers (LXC).Continue Reading

• Master the seven key DevOps engineer skills for 2018

  We all know DevOps is hard, but complex new technologies are going to make the development methodology even more challenging. Expert Bob Reselman outlines the skills you'll need.Continue Reading

• The future of DevOps in 2018? More people, more integration

  From DataOps to function as a service, DevOps adoption is going to mean acquiring some new skills in 2018. Contributor George Lawton asks the experts.Continue Reading

• Embark upon ITSM asset management with systematic tagging

  The journey to an organized data center begins with a single tag. Start using IT tags today to apply updates, control access and help automate management.Continue Reading

• Evaluate ChatOps tools and bots for the right fit

  ChatOps is still a niche in IT operations and DevOps shops, but organizations that have set it up love it. That means you should join the fun and give it a try. Here's what you need to know about ChatOps tools.Continue Reading

• Know when to implement serverless vs. containers

  Containers save resources and reduce deploy times. So does serverless. Containers are a great host for microservices. So is serverless. But the deployment options are more different than they are alike.Continue Reading

• A good IT orchestration system saves time for users and admins

  Rather than fight with business workers about runaway IT resource consumption and complex demands on tight deadlines, let an orchestration platform control the process.Continue Reading

• Red Hat Virtualization (RHV)

  Red Hat Virtualization (RHV) is an enterprise-class virtualization platform produced by Red Hat.Continue Reading

• Two Ansible playbook examples illustrate config management

  Configuration management enables automation for many operations tasks. Ansible uses a simple structure and a dynamic language to enable admins to easily complete jobs, once they get the hang of a playbook.Continue Reading

• Docker Content Trust

  Docker Content Trust is a feature in the Docker containerization platform that enables remote registry content to be digitally signed, ensuring that the content is unaltered and is the most current available version when users access it.Continue Reading

• Centralize Ubuntu server management on Landscape

  Canonical Landscape brings centralized server management to Ubuntu on physical and virtual machines, as well as cloud systems. See how it works, and explore features such as tagging.Continue Reading

• cloud orchestration (cloud orchestrator)

  Cloud orchestration is the use of programming technology to manage the interconnections and interactions among workloads on public and private cloud infrastructure.Continue Reading

• Kubernetes Node

  A Kubernetes Node is a logical collection of IT resources that supports one or more containers.Continue Reading

• Kubernetes volume

  A Kubernetes volume is a directory that contains data accessible to containers in a given Pod in the orchestration and scheduling platform.Continue Reading

• Citrix XenServer

  Citrix XenServer is an open source server virtualization platform based on the Xen hypervisor.Continue Reading

• With continuous security, SecDevOps deconstructs CI/CD

  Nothing is set in stone when an organization follows a DevOps methodology -- a DevOps security model pushes developers and ops to constantly retune, slow down and speed up.Continue Reading

• Follow a PXE boot tutorial to increase OS configuration automation

  PXE boot servers are simple to set up and can aid in IT operations' goals toward high-level efficiency and automation. This tutorial runs through setup and optimal settings.Continue Reading

• Infrastructure as code benefits range from audits to ops

  When an auditor asks to see how the entire application stack is configured, you'll recognize the benefits of an infrastructure-as-code implementation.Continue Reading

• The application runtime environment is as important as the app

  To avoid cascading failures and never-ending troubleshooting, take the time to understand the software and hardware -- the runtime environment -- that keeps an app ticking.Continue Reading

• CoreOS rkt

  CoreOS rkt (pronounced rocket) is a containerization engine to run application workloads in isolation from the underlying infrastructure.Continue Reading

• The future of cloud computing looks foggy

  The concept of cloud, while never sharply defined, may be growing even less clear. The intenet of things, for example, means more connected devices are showing up in more places, an unstoppable trend that will affect the future of cloud computing. ...Continue Reading

• Windows Server containers and Hyper-V containers explained

  It's important to not only understand the differences between these two container types but also the specific requirements, deployment considerations and management practices.Continue Reading

• Paravirtualization advantages, disadvantages and use cases

  Despite a promising start, paravirtualization comes with significant disadvantages that limit the number of use cases that make sense for enterprise IT, but it still has its place.Continue Reading

• ITSM processes must take this chance to help the business

  ITSM implementations still have value in today's DevOps world, but only if admins can get their processes aligned with the grander business goals.Continue Reading

• Kubernetes scheduler

  Kubernetes scheduler is a part of the open source Kubernetes container orchestration platform that controls performance, capacity and availability through policies and topology awareness.Continue Reading

• Kubernetes Pod

  Kubernetes Pods are the smallest deployable computing units in the open source Kubernetes container scheduling and orchestration environment.Continue Reading

• Learn DevOps techniques in a home lab

  Not allowed to put work projects on GitHub? Want to run containers even though your company is still virtualizing servers? Get ahead with techniques and tools in a DevOps home lab.Continue Reading

• Rethinking your place on the early adopter curve

  The best-run organizations will have a technology infrastructure in place to thoroughly support the business and all its goals. While most companies fall short of that perfection, even an operation that's close to the ideal should feel good about ...Continue Reading

• Container Linux by CoreOS

  Container Linux by CoreOS, originally named CoreOS Linux, is an open source operating system (OS) that provides the functionality required to deploy and manage applications within containers.Continue Reading

• Ubuntu Core

  Ubuntu Core is a transactional version of the Ubuntu Linux OS, made specifically for internet of things (IoT) devices and large container deployments.Continue Reading

• Docker Hub

  Docker Hub is a cloud-based repository in which Docker users and partners create, test, store and distribute container images.Continue Reading

• Alpine Linux

  Alpine Linux is a small, security-oriented, lightweight Linux distribution based on the musl libc library and BusyBox utilities platform instead of GNU.Continue Reading

• Red Hat Atomic Host

  Red Hat Atomic Host is a variant of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux supported, open source operating system, designed to be a minimal OS with optimizations for container hosting.Continue Reading

• RancherOS (Linux)

  RancherOS is a lightweight Linux operating system distribution that includes only the necessary libraries and services to deploy and scale containers.Continue Reading

• Know how container host machine resources get used?

  What's a container's resource limit? How do they scale? What OS does a host machine need? Answer 10 questions to prove your container deployment knowledge.Continue Reading

• A deployment pipeline keeps infrastructure ducks in their rows

  IT infrastructure is difficult to get right. Whether to stand up a test/dev server or deploy a new app to production, infrastructure developers turn to a deployment pipeline to build IT.Continue Reading

• Come to grips with immutable infrastructure in production

  Immutable infrastructure is a developer approach to application hosting that's made its way into the IT ops lexicon. It's time to understand the changes it brings to application support.Continue Reading

• Ansible playbook

  An Ansible playbook is an organized unit of scripts that defines work for a server configuration managed by the automation tool Ansible.Continue Reading

• YAML (YAML Ain't Markup Language)

  YAML (YAML Ain't Markup Language) is a data-oriented language structure used as the input format for diverse software applications.Continue Reading

• Docker Engine

  Docker Engine is the underlying client-server technology that builds and runs containers using Docker's components and services.Continue Reading

• Agentless Ansible structure opens up configuration management potential

  Ansible is easy to use for IT ops pros, and it supports multicloud functionality within its automation structure. This simple walkthrough gets sys admins started with the tool.Continue Reading

• The art of managing IT risk is never quite mastered

  Risks abound, and no amount of preparation or caution will eliminate them entirely from our lives. This is as true now as it was in the past, and it likely will remain true in the future.

  While technology enables us all to work more effectively ...Continue Reading

• software asset management (SAM)

  Software asset management (SAM) is the part of IT asset management that seeks to ensure compliance with license agreements and prevent overspending on software.Continue Reading

• IT asset tracking informs better capacity, management decisions

  Detailed IT asset inventories are a result of granular asset tracking and lead to better server and storage management -- among other benefits.Continue Reading

• Learn shell scripts: A sys admin's guide to automation

  Shell scripts and sys admins should be best friends. A day rarely goes by without using some form of shell script or another. Learn how those scripts work and start writing them.Continue Reading

• legacy application

  A legacy application (legacy app) is a software program that is outdated or obsolete.Continue Reading

• Deep dive into Hyper-V files and folders

  Understanding all aspects of a Hyper-V installation now makes it easier to troubleshoot problems later. Look under the hood of Hyper-V files and folders to prep for the worst.Continue Reading

• How well do you know Docker components and services?

  With Docker containers moving into more enterprise IT shops, it's imperative to grasp how the technology works. Test your knowledge of Docker components and services with this quiz.Continue Reading

• Draw a DevOps adoption roadmap by learning from current users

  The DevOps methodology is rapidly on the rise, with one estimate that three-fourths of businesses are using it. There are some best practices to make the transition less rocky.Continue Reading

• site reliability engineering (SRE)

  Site reliability engineering (SRE) is the application of scripting and automation to IT operations tasks such as maintenance and support. The goal of SRE is to swiftly fix bugs and remove manual work in rote tasks.Continue Reading

• Staring down the security issues in cloud computing

  Adoption of cloud computing has no doubt been slowed by worries about the security of those out-of-sight servers and resources. While reasonable, those worries have given way over time to acceptance and even optimism.

  In this month's Modern ...Continue Reading

• Virtual Machine Management Service

  Virtual Machine Management Service, also known as VMMS or vmms.exe, is the main module in Microsoft Windows operating system that controls all aspects of Hyper-V server virtualization.Continue Reading

• Shipyard floats a Docker GUI for easier container management

  Deploying new Docker images is the easy part; managing and reporting on those instances is tricky. IT teams can use the Shipyard GUI to stop, start, orchestrate and manage Docker.Continue Reading

• Application support and maintenance add up to operational ALM

  An application isn't fully grown when it moves from development to production -- it still needs nurturing to meet its full potential.Continue Reading

• How the Puppet architecture manipulates configurations

  Puppet is intrinsically scalable, enabling IT teams to manage one machine or hundreds. Its architecture makes the configuration management tool compatible with a range of IT setups.Continue Reading

• Real-life change management examples prove it's harder than it looks

  Whether your IT shop rigorously follows a service management framework or takes a laissez-faire approach to changes, these examples help hone change management procedures.Continue Reading

• Puppet (Puppet Labs)

  Puppet is an open source systems management tool for centralizing and automating configuration management. Administrators can encode the configuration of a service as a policy, which Puppet then monitors and enforces.Continue Reading

• Idempotent configuration management sets things right -- no matter what

  Idempotency ensures a system won't stray from its designated desired state, sending alerts to systems administrators if a requested change would cause a disruption.Continue Reading

• IT incident report

  An IT incident report is documentation of an event that has disrupted the normal operation of some IT system (or that had the potential to do so) and how that situation was handled.Continue Reading

• virtualization administrator

  A virtualization administrator is an employee whose responsibilities include virtual environment set up and maintenance, in addition to traditional sysadmin duties.Continue Reading

• Salt minions and grains facilitate deployment at scale

  A tiered management setup and finely grained monitoring capabilities make SaltStack's configuration management tool worth considering.Continue Reading

• preventive maintenance

  Preventive maintenance is the practice of routinely taking measures in hardware administration that reduces the risk of failures and improves the likelihood of quick recovery in the event that a failure does occur.Continue Reading

• DevOps capabilities vary widely by industry vertical

  DevOps isn't the same from one IT shop to another, let alone from healthcare to retail IT. Some verticals rise higher than others when it comes to agility and communication.Continue Reading

• IT service delivery model uses BPM to translate ops to biz

  A business process management structure for IT service delivery can bridge the gap between IT and the rest of the business, allowing IT leaders to sit at the table for important decisions.Continue Reading

• Setting up and controlling resources on a Proxmox cluster

  You're learned how to create Proxmox hosts and group them into a cluster. Now it's time to add resources to your cluster and assign access rights to them.Continue Reading

• Linux Containers Project

  Linux Containers is a project created to provide a distro- and vendor-neutral environment for the development of Linux container technologies.Continue Reading

• Loggly

  Loggly is a cloud-based enterprise log management and analytics tool. The Software as a Service product makes log data accessible and useful to more groups within an enterprise.Continue Reading

• Perforce Software

  Perforce is a software company that specializes in software configuration management, version control and collaboration products. The company is the recognized market leader in version control within the gaming sector.Continue Reading

• Kibana

  Kibana is an open source data visualization and exploration platform from Elastic that is specialized for large volumes of streaming and real-time data.Continue Reading

• Elastic

  Elastic is a software company that provides products and services related to Elasticsearch, its distributed enterprise search engine.Continue Reading

• application monitoring and management (AMM)

  Application monitoring and management is the administrative area and associated tools involved with overseeing the operation of business software and ensuring that it functions and performs as expected.Continue Reading

• shift left testing

  Shift left testing is an approach used to speed software testing and facilitate development by moving the testing process to an earlier point in the development cycle.Continue Reading

• incremental shift left testing

  Incremental shift left testing is a widely adopted method that starts testing earlier in the development cycle – shifting it to the left on the timeline -- and breaks complex development down into smaller pieces that build upon each other.Continue Reading

• Git

  Git is a free and open source distributed code management and version control system that is distributed under the GNU General Public License version 2.Continue Reading

• DevOps certification

  DevOps certification is a formalized testing program intended to ensure that applicants have achieved an appropriate level of skills and knowledge for working in the converged areas of software development and IT operations.Continue Reading

• ChatOps

  ChatOps is the use of chat clients, chatbots and real-time communication tools to facilitate how software development and operation tasks are communicated and executed.Continue Reading

• How application scalability works in event-driven vs. IaaS computing

  Event-driven computing saves IT admins' time and helps application scalability, compared to managing traditional cloud infrastructure. But IaaS and event-driven computing aren't exclusive.Continue Reading

• rolling deployment

  A rolling deployment is the installation of software updates on one server or server subset at a time, rather than updating all servers or server subsets at the same time.Continue Reading

• How is runtime as a service different from PaaS or IaaS?

  What is runtime as a service and how does it differ from platform as a service and infrastructure as a service?Continue Reading

• unikernel

  A unikernel is a library-based operating system that only includes functionalities required by the specific application that runs on it.Continue Reading

• Docker Swarm

  Docker Swarm is a clustering and scheduling tool for Docker containers. Orchestration frees containers from a single host for failover, load balancing and other benefits.Continue Reading

• immutable infrastructure

  Immutable infrastructure is an approach to managing services and software deployments on IT resources wherein components are replaced rather than changed. An application or services is effectively redeployed each time any change occurs.Continue Reading

• A continuous delivery model right on time

  With continuous delivery, good enough makes things better for business. Changing to this delivery model doesn't alleviate all app problems, but the right implementation means fewer of them.Continue Reading

• Apache Mesos

  Apache Mesos is a cluster manager that isolates and shares pooled resources from across clusters with applications and frameworks. Mesos is open source and uses schedulers and executors in a master-slave architecture.Continue Reading

• Hadoop workflow automation lets IT pros go with the flow

  Hadoop workflow managers are not just resource schedulers. They handle intricate tasks and service handoffs that are essential for managing big data services.Continue Reading

• Modern open source systems management

  The open source sector abounds with configuration management, monitoring and analytics, CI/CD tools and more to arm IT teams against failure in complex apps and infrastructure.Continue Reading

• Primer on DevOps roles and responsibilities

  DevOps planning in enterprises revolves around getting the right teams in place, the necessary skills spiffed up and the proper tools to make it all come together.Continue Reading

• IT performance management (information technology performance management)

  IT performance management includes purchasing decisions, the standardization of IT equipment and guidance on capital and human resources. The goal is to ensure that key performance indicators (KPIs), service levels and budgets are in compliance with...Continue Reading

• disaggregated server

  A disaggregated server is a server that breaks up components and resources into subsystems. Disaggregated servers can be adapted to changing storage or compute loads as needed without replacing or disrupting an entire server for an extended period ...Continue Reading

• hardware security

  Hardware security is vulnerability protection that comes in the form of a physical device rather than software that is installed on the hardware of a computer system. The term also refers to the protection of physical systems from harm.Continue Reading

• Adding an additional virtual bridge to a KVM environment

  Virtualization expert Sander Van Vugt offers tips to simplify the process of adding a second software bridge to your KVM environment to run VMs in an isolated SDN.Continue Reading

• Pop quiz: Test your knowledge of open source terminology

  Open source technology is a wild west at times. Make sure your open source terminology is up to snuff with this short quiz.Continue Reading

• IT operations management (ITOM)

  IT operations management (ITOM) is the administrative area involving technology infrastructure components and the requirements of individual applications, services, storage, networking and connectivity elements within an organization.Continue Reading

• IT operations analytics (ITOA)

  IT operations analytics (ITOA) is the practice of monitoring systems and gathering, processing and interpreting data from various operations sources to guide decisions and predict potential issues.Continue Reading