Articles : DevOps

When it comes to current industry development trends, DevOps and DevSecOps are two of the big buzzwords that many organizations focus on. It shouldn’t be difficult to understand why, as both approaches to development allow teams to better understand what goes on with their software in production and bring them more in tune with the end user, leading to better software—at least in theory.

The problem with industry buzzwords like "DevOps" is that companies feel they need to attach themselves to them in order to remain relevant and retain talent. While wanting to be on the cutting edge of technology is admirable for any company, too often it leads down a path of adopting concepts they don’t fully understand and aren’t prepared for. 

The cloud was one of the biggest game-changers in the software development world. It has drastically changed the way that we develop software for a global audience. However, moving to the cloud is far more than just migrating your software systems. It requires a change in the way you think about software design and development, and before you can make this move, you need to understand what it means to design software with a cloud-native mindset.

In an upcoming series of blog articles we analyse the lessons to be learned from COVID-19 and how to design for uncertainty. This series tackles 5 main topics which are introduced below. To follow the series “Designing for Uncertainty” please subscribe to our blog.

Developers building business-critical applications need an IT environment that allows them to work quickly and securely. This means having reliable web servers that are always available and protected. However, in the agile world of modern application development, they can’t always wait for the IT team to set up and configure load balancers and ADCs for them. They need their own solutions, and they need them to be tailored to their own needs. When we developed Snapt Nova, we were our first customer. Our development team uses Nova themselves (the process known as "dogfooding") to provide load balancing for Nova development and deployment. This post is about what developers need, how the right load balancer or application delivery controller (ADC) can support and empower developers, and why Nova might be the best load balancer for developers – or, at least, why our own developers seem to think it is.

The load balancer market is evolving from feature-heavy hardware appliances to lightweight software solutions and flexible cloud-native implementations. But if you’re evaluating load balancer options, how do you bridge the gap between old world systems and the new? Do you prioritize the product features you’ve come to rely on or the advantages of flexibility? What are the pros and cons?

The rise of DevOps engineers has changed how IT teams monitor the health of their systems and networks. Rather than having a siloed organization with specialized staff managing specific pieces of equipment, a DevOps team comprises tech generalists who take a more holistic view of the system and prioritize application performance. They need a different set of metrics, along with notifications and alerts, to analyze how business-critical applications are performing. This blog highlights five key metrics for optimizing application performance. 

In this blog we look at Red Hat, one of the market’s innovative enterprise Linux OS providers, and how Snapt’s standalone ADC solution, Snapt Aria, meets the needs of Red Hat deployments.   

If you’re running your business applications in containers and managing those with Kubernetes, you’re probably aware of the limitations of traditional Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) and Load Balancers in this environment. Traditional load balancers simply do not have the scalability and agility needed for cloud native deployments. Whether you’re already up and running in containers or just getting started, this blog will tell you all you need to know for choosing the best load balancer for Kubernetes.