DevOps

Kubernetes (“K8s”) won the battle of container orchestration tools. Now AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud each offer a managed Kubernetes version. How do they compare?

DevOps is an oft-misunderstood buzzword, seen as a trendy must-have in the form of technologies, tools, and staff to acquire. But it’s much more, yet much simpler, than that.

Automatically scaling container deployments in a microservices-based app architecture is downright luxurious…once it’s set up. But what’s the best way to tune an app’s orchestration parameters?

Most continuous deployment (CD) systems test code before rolling it out—but there’s a better way. Learn how to use Kubernetes to build an easily extendable event-driven CD pipeline that is optimized for reliable test results.

When your app’s next iteration is ready to deploy, you have two choices: either stop the entire application and deploy the new version manually every time or build an automated zero downtime CI/CD deployment pipeline once.

In this article, Toptal Freelance DevOps Engineer Gaurav Kohli demonstrates the latter using the Jenkins-powered continuous deployment pipeline of a three-tier web application built in Node.js, deployed on AWS Cloud, and using Terraform as an infrastructure orchestrator.

Writing an application is only part of the story. In order for it to be of value, it needs deploying somewhere it can scale; it has to run with high availability, have backups, and so on. Deployment and infrastructure management isn’t a simple process. And Terraform does nothing to hide the complexity. However, it does make your infrastructure declarative and reproducible, like your code.

In this article, Toptal Freelance DevOps Engineer Radosław Szalski teaches us what Terraform is, how its components work, and how to configure an entire AWS Cloud solution in minutes using its configuration language.

Moving to a microservices architecture often raises the question: What is the best environment to stabilize services? Here’s how and why you should use Kubernetes, Docker, and CircleCI to containerize and deploy apps.

Do you run deployment scripts from your development machine, or find yourself referring to deployments by the day of the week they were deployed, instead of using version numbers? It’s time for a better solution.

In this article, Freelance Ruby Engineer and automation enthusiast Amin Shah Gilani walks you through his perfect deployment pipeline to use at the beginning of your project. With this CI/CD configuration, every push is tested, the master branch is deployed to staging servers with a fresh database dump from the production server, and versioned tags are deployed to production with backups and migrations running automatically.

Software delivery has come a long way. And, somewhere between the transition from physical media to software containers, we have changed the way we try to manage them.

In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Jonathan Bethune explores how software containers have motivated us to treat servers as more dispensable, and the risks and rewards involved.