The Vamp Blog

Top 10 DevOps, SRE and Cloud Conferences of 2020

You might be building complex distributed systems, but this selection of cloud, DevOps and SRE conferences puts some of the industry’s best events into a single, simple listicle. We invite you to be there and be x 3!

Canary Releasing

Balancing throughput and stability in your release management process

Increasing software delivery performance is not as simple as it looks. Organizations often fall into the ‘enterprise release trap’, thinking slow throughput of new releases is a way of ensuring stability in the production environment. How to balance that? Let's take a practical look.

Canary Releasing

How Testing in Production isn't Scary. Actually, it can benefit your entire organization

Dev vs Ops, product vs IT, senior vs product management – the fear of releasing new software into production can expose hidden tensions in any organization. In this post, we look at how testing in production can relieve fear and make everyone’s job, from product owner to support teams, easier.

Canary Releasing

A Pager-Duty-Free Christmas Blog Post Special

You’re 20…30…80 minutes into a production outage, and it’s Christmas Day. As you're faced with a dreaded manual rollback scenario, you might be asking the spirit of Christmas “why me?”. In this Christmas Blog Post, we invite you to answer a more constructive question: Did it have to be this way?

AB Testing

Why Testing in Production Needn't be so Scary! Because, yes, it can be safe

For many, testing in production sounds cool, but also like living on the edge - think base-jumping for your application environment. The truth is that testing in production can be completely safe. And it's key to releasing features faster without breaking things.

Canary Releasing

Deploying vs Releasing: the differences you should know to prevent outages

You can be regularly deploying to production, but still be doing rolling updates as part of your release process. That means big, risky releases that result in issues. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Canary Releasing

Release Strategies Episode Three: Canary releasing or the “how-to-scale” guide to release management

It’s Friday at 3pm…are you ready to push the release button? In this post, we unpack how building canary releases around release policies can transform a manual, subjective and error-prone process into a repeatable, hands-off, data-driven release process.

Kubernetes

Vamp’s a sponsor at O’Reilly Velocity and Software Architecture Conference 2019 – and you’re invited!

It’s coming! Catch up on today’s biggest trends in cloud-native systems like Kubernetes, site reliability engineering and observability at this year’s combined O'Reilly Velocity and Software Architecture Conference in Berlin from Nov 4-7.

Canary Releasing

Release Strategies Episode Two: Blue-green deployment or the “rough cut” guide to release management

Lucky release t-shirts anyone? In our last blog post, we talked about “big bang” software releases. In this post, we explore the pros and cons of blue-green deployments and start unpacking canary releasing as a release strategy.

Canary Releasing

Release Strategies Episode One: The “big bang” or the “how-not-to” guide to release management

Nail-biting? Finger-crossing? The hokey pokey in reverse pentagram? While there are many potentially nerve-wracking moments in any software delivery lifecycle (SDLC), none can fill a team with white-hot fear quite like the release step.

State of DevOps 2019: Security is Key to DevOps Evolution, Release is Key to DevOps Revolution

By now, anyone with a pulse in the software industry has read that mature DevOps organizations collaborate early, often and deeply on security thanks to this year’s Puppet State of DevOps Report

Kubernetes

Network Policies made easy on GKE

At Vamp our trial clusters present a harsh security challenge. We want trial users to bring their own containers but we don’t want them to have access to the Vamp infrastructure.

Microservices

The Misconceptions of Moving to Microservices Part Three: teams don't need to share operational telemetry

In this series of blog posts, we talked about various misconceptions of microservice architectures and the organizational structures around them. We touched on testing-in-production as a strategy to ensure teams can continue working

DevOps

How to Save Big on Google's Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Using Preemptible Nodes

Using a mix of normal and preemptible nodes we were able to save 44% on our Google Cloud bill.

Microservices

The Misconceptions of Moving to Microservices Part Two: services perform perfectly all of the time

In a microservice architecture and organizational structure, teams can work in relative isolation during the development cycle. In part one of this series, we looked at how that approach works well throughout the

Microservices

The Misconceptions of Moving to Microservices Part One: your team can work in full isolation

Building microservice architectures is a staple of cloud-native development. And with good reasons. There are significant benefits to splitting up your software into smaller, more manageable parts, allowing each team to work on

Microservices

Schrödinger's Canary

Sometimes, releasing software to production is like Schrödinger’s cat. You don’t know how well the release performs until you observe it in a live production environment. That is already daunting if

Microservices

Everything a Machine: Automate CI/CD to Bend, Even When Code Breaks

Fast! Microservices! Cloud! A bright, shiny CI/CD pipeline that pumps out innovative but reliable software at scale – how often have you thought “sure, I’ll get right on that!” while in digital

Kubernetes

Your Top 4 Must-See Talks at KubeCon 2019: True Confessions of Cloud-Native Addicts

Lurid tales of failure, heartwarming stories of human triumph and big visions on the future of DevOps, whoever dares claim that going cloud-native is dry has yet to see our top picks for

Kubernetes

Custom data sources for A/B testing with Vamp Lamia and Istio 1.0.2

Welcome to our ongoing series of post on our experiences in using Istio during the development of Vamp Lamia. In our previous post, we presented Vamp Lamia’s approach to A/B testing

Kubernetes

Welch's t-test for A/B testing with Vamp Lamia and Istio 1.0.2

Welcome back to our ongoing series on the development of Vamp Lamia and our experiences in using Istio for traffic routing on Kubernetes. In one of our previous posts, we presented our approach

Kubernetes

Securing Ingress Services in Istio with Let’s Encrypt on Kubernetes

This is the third post in our series describing our experiences in adopting Istio for traffic routing on Kubernetes. For more details on what we are trying to achieve with Vamp Lamia and

Kubernetes

Advanced Networking with Istio on Kubernetes

Welcome to the third post in the ongoing series describing our experiences in adopting Istio and the development of Vamp Lamia. For more details on what we are trying to achieve with Vamp

Kubernetes

A/B testing on Kubernetes with Istio 0.8

This is the second post in our ongoing series describing our experiences in adopting Istio for traffic routing on Kubernetes. For more details on what we are trying to achieve with Vamp and

Kubernetes

Putting Istio to work

This is part of an ongoing series of posts describing Vamp’s Gateway Agent component and our experiences of adopting Istio for east-west traffic on Kubernetes. In this post we want to introduce

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