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March DevOps News, Updates & Tips DevOps People Will Love! Part 1.

We continue to collect trending DevOps news to share with everyone who loves DevOps and works on DevOps projects. If you missed the recent DevOps news and updates, check our new digest for the DevOps & CloudOps community. Get ready for a fresh slice of DevOps stuff and continue reading to learn something useful today.

1. Tech giants suspend their activities in Russia and Belarus

As Russia’s war on Ukraine continues, a growing number of tech companies have cut business ties with the aggressors. Cisco announced that the company was stopping all business in Russia and Belarus following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as lending security assistance to protect Ukraine from cyberattacks. Microsoft announced the suspension of all new sales of Microsoft products and services in Russia. Google paused Google ads in this area, suspended new Cloud sign-ups, limited the payments functionality for most of their services, and monetization features for YouTube viewers in Russia. IBM stopped selling technology, GitLab suspended new businesses in Russia and Belarus, and MongoDB is terminating Russian accounts. This list is regularly updated as more and more enterprises show their support for Ukraine.

2. A serious Linux vulnerability was uncovered

Yet another high-severity vulnerability in Linux was discovered and made public by Max Kellermann recently. The cybersecurity researcher initially noticed the bug a year ago, but it took time for him to figure out what was happening. The vulnerability was labeled as CVE-2022-0847 and has been nicknamed “Dirty Pipe” due to its close resemblance to Dirty Cow, a Linux bug from 2016. But what does Dirty Pipe do?

Kellermann found out that the vulnerability allows the overwriting of data in arbitrary read-only files. This means untrusted users are able to execute code capable of carrying out a bunch of malicious actions, including modifying scripts utilized by privileged services or apps, installing backdoors, or creating unauthorized user accounts. The vulnerability affects Linux Kernel 5.8 and later versions but was fixed in Linux 5.16.11, 5.15.25, and 5.10.102.

3. How to monitor your SSL certificates

Don’t you know whether your SSL certificates are about to expire or not? Here is a simple solution that can be useful for both small projects and enterprises. Haveibeenexpired is a simple and affordable tool to keep SSL certificates under control. It constantly watches your SSL certificates and notifies you well in advance of their expiration.Haveibeenexpired uses Certificate Transparency to find all hosts that need to be checked and offers Slack, Discord, and other types of notifications for a more convenient experience. A basic subscription plan includes up to 100 daily SSL checks for free.

4. What is Platform Engineering?

Platform Engineering is quickly becoming as popular as DevOps and SRE, but what does it mean, practically speaking? Platform Engineering focuses on the development stage.

Platform engineering specialists apply software engineering principles to improve and accelerate software delivery. Platform engineers take care of the software delivery lifecycle, ensuring software development teams have all they need, improving developer experience, and providing a holistic approach to software development.

Read Daniel Bryant’s interesting Twitter thread on Platform Engineering to learn more about its history, current trends, and future.

5. New Amazon RDS for MySQL & PostgreSQL Multi-AZ Deployment Option

On March 2, Amazon announced a new Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) Multi-AZ deployment option to which two readable standby instances were added. This deployment option is available for MySQL and PostgreSQL databases. Benefits include:

• faster write operations since the new Multi-AZ DB cluster leverages M6gd and R6gd instance types
• failover operations are typically fast: the system is designed to fail over as quickly as 35 seconds, plus the time to apply any pending transaction log
• the two standby instances are hot standbys
• local storage leveraging for the transaction log optimizes replication

For more detail and step-by-step instructions on how to create a new database cluster with the Multi-AZ DB cluster deployment option, read the Amazon blog.

6. National Security Agency Cybersecurity Technical Report, March 2022

The National Security Agency (NSA) has released a new Cybersecurity Technical Report (CTR): Network Infrastructure Security Guidance. The report contains best practices based on hands-on experience in supporting customers and responding to threats. The NSA recommendations include a wide range of measures to improve cybersecurity on all levels including perimeter and internal network defenses to enhance monitoring and access controls throughout the network. For all the detail and practical advice, check the report.

7. ServiceNow launches an incident management platform with observability features

ServiceNow has added an incident management platform to its SaaS portfolio that is based on the Lightstep observability platform ServiceNow, acquired in 2021. Lightstep Incident Response Platform from ServiceNow gives DevOps professionals access to observability tools to detect root causes of incidents much faster. The solution allows the combining of on-call escalation, alert grouping, incident analysis, and remediation with a bunch of incident management tools.

Lightstep Incident Response is available now in both free and paid versions. Plus, it also integrates with the Now Platform that ServiceNow offers for IT service management (ITSM).

8. Kubernetes 1.23.5 now released

While Kubernetes 1.23 with 47 enhancements was released back in 2021, the platform is constantly improving with patch releases. The most recent release is 1.23.5. What does it include? It fixes a regression in v1beta1 PodDisruptionBudget handling of “strategic merge patch”-type API requests for the selector.

In addition, 8 issues (bugs, errors and regressions) were fixed. Check the Kubernetes page on GitHub for more details. And we all are looking forward to the next Kubernetes release!

Bottom line

Profisea’s experts are constantly looking for the most interesting DevOps and Cloud news to share with you. Tell us what you want to see in our next digest and what topics we need to cover. Our team is busy preparing a new slice of useful info for you. And if you are planning to move to the Cloud, thinking about utilizing DevOps as a Service, or adopting Kubernetes, feel free to contact us. We are here to take your business to the next level as we always have the best DevOps and CloudOps practices at our fingertips.