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Tag: database configuration

  • Bitnami Offers Popular Application with Managed Database Configuration in Azure Marketplace

    Multi-tier Packages of WordPress and Drupal with Azure Database Services Remove Complexity of Deploying Enterprise Configurations

    SAN FRANCISCO, CA – January 15, 2018 —Bitnami, the leading provider of application packaging, is excited to announce the availability of WordPress and Drupal pre-configured with support for Azure Database for MariaDB in the Azure Marketplace. Bitnami has collaborated with the Azure Database Services team to deliver packages that make it much easier for companies to deploy enterprise configurations of these popular and widely used applications to Microsoft Azure.

    Deploying one of these new ‘Bitnami Certified’ application packages enables companies to realize the benefits of stability, security, and simplicity, while harnessing the power of a fully managed Azure database. The result is the ability to scale quickly and reach global distribution without worrying about costly downtime.

    “The new Bitnami packages significantly improves enterprise productivity by reducing the effort involved in packaging and deploying complex multi-tier architectures, while offering guaranteed high-availability, security, and dynamic scale with Azure OSS Database services” said Sudhakar Sannakkayala, General Manager, Azure Data engineering. “Our customers can now simply scroll through the Azure Marketplace, select an offering, and click ‘launch’ to deploy one of these applications.”

    “Bitnami has worked with the Azure Database team to create packages that deliver the reliability, security and ease of use of Bitnami Certified applications and the flexibility and power of Azure,” said Bitnami Vice President of Business Development and Sales Pete Catalanello. “Because Bitnami optimizes packaging for Azure, it is easy to utilize platform services such as databases, auto-scaling, and load-balancing. The combination of Bitnami and Azure delivers what customers say they care about most.”

    A long-term Microsoft partner, Bitnami provides a wide range of pre-packaged, easy to deploy open-source applications and development stacks to the Azure Marketplace. It supports Microsoft enterprise customers in multi-tier environments in numerous ways, and actively works with the Azure Database team to provide enterprise solutions and promote best practices. Other multi-tier Bitnami solutions for Azure include:

    • Stacksmith, which enables enterprises to package their own multi-tier applications for Azure and AKS. Users can define best practices once and enforce them when packaging and updating. This includes configuration requirements for the use of Azure Databases for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MariaDB.
    • Kubeapps, an open-source web-based interface for discovering and provisioning applications on a Kubernetes cluster. Microsoft has partnered with Bitnami to integrate Kubeapps with Open Service Broker for Azure. With Kubeapps, users can create and present Helm charts that leverage Azure-native PaaS services as part of the architecture.

    With this combination, a user could deploy an application tier on AKS and an Azure Database backend to achieve a highly-scalable application with a highly available database. They could then use Stacksmith to maintain and update these applications with their PaaS service integrations going forward.

    Bitnami continues to expand the scope and number of enterprise solutions to make it ever easier for users to set up and deploy complex environments that leverage first party Azure services. For a closer look at these multi-tier enterprise solutions, register for the Create an Application-Centric DevOps Experience with Stacksmith and Azure OSS Database Services webinar. To access the new WordPress or Drupal packages, visit the Azure Marketplace.

    About Bitnami

    Bitnami provides packaged applications for any platform. The Bitnami application automation platform delivers and maintains a catalog of 130+ ready-to-run server applications and development environments in partnership with the world’s leading cloud providers including Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle, driving over 1.3 million deployments per month. Bitnami is helping to shape the future of software deployment via its leadership role in the evolution of the Kubernetes ecosystem, including being the authors and maintainers of Kubeless and Kubeapps projects and major contributors to helm. Based in San Francisco and with offices around the world, Bitnami is a privately held, rapidly growing company. For more information, visit https://www.bitnami.com, or follow us on Twitter (@Bitnami) and Facebook.

    Kris Kraves

    Cogenta Communications, Inc.

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    www.cogentacom.com

    @kriskraves

  • DevOps Survey Says! State of DevOps, Reliance on Scripting and IT Automation

    DevOps Survey Says! State of DevOps, Reliance on Scripting and IT Automation

    What our surveys told us about the state of DevOps, Reliance on Scripting and IT Automation

    DevOps Survey Results: Scripting & IT Automation

    A lot of IT Operations teams including application owners, configuration managers, middleware specialists and database administrators are managing infrastructure configuration change with manual processes, spreadsheets and scripts. They are spending a lot of time writing and maintaining a lot of scripts. Even with all those scripts, spreadsheets and processes and the resources they consume, teams are still not getting the visibility, control and error-proofing that they require.

    That is the message from five recent surveys conducted by Orcaconfig among IT industry pros. Perhaps these results should not be that surprising. But several years into the DevOps and IT automation movements, there is still plenty of room for improvement.

    About one-third of respondents said they spent more than half of their time writing and maintaining scripts.

     

    In complex application environments with multiple relationships and dependencies between applications, databases, middleware and operating systems, “changing this can easily (and unwittingly) change that.” Gartner refers to this as a domino effect. So, scripting to deploy changes becomes more and more tricky and thus, requires more and more time to do, test, redo and retest.

     

    		  what_percentage_of_time_is_spent_writing_or_maintaining_scripts_-_survey_from_orcaconfig-com_2

    Because of the risks involved with release or configuration-related scripting errors in production environments, some organizations hand these typical operations responsibilities to developers. The question is worth asking: Is release and configuration-released scripting the best use of Dev or Ops’s time?

     how_do_you_maintain_scripts_when_the_author_is_no_longer_available_-_survey_from_orcaconfig-com_3 With all these scripts holding key configurations together, are organizations at risk of “losing the recipe” if key employees leave? Apparently so. In our surveys, 30 percent of respondents admitted, “It’s a problem, we don’t really have a solution in place,” when asked about maintaining the spaghetti-works of scripts if some of those key employees suddenly leave the organization. Nearly half mentioned that they rely on transfer of information (TOI) before a key employee leaves.

     

    Employees exit companies for a number of reasons and some are in a bigger hurry than others to move on. Does TOI provide all the safeguards needed for the enterprise?

    Scripting might consume a great deal of IT resources and introduce a considerable risk with the loss of key talent. But does it at least accomplish the functionality that teams need? The next few charts provide insight to how well scripting achieves the visibility and error-proofed automation that teams need.

    Ecosystem Visibility

    Configuration Drift Detection

    For performance, security and audit reasons, organizations have an ongoing need to maintain configuration compliance in their application ecosystems. So detecting configuration drift is essential. Automatically detecting configuration drift is the goal. Despite complaints about the method, approximately half of respondents relied on scripting to accomplish drift detection.

    		  how_does_your_organization_detect_configuration_drift_in_complex_application_database_middleware_environements_-_survey_from_orcaconfig-com_2

     

     how_do_you_know_which_databases_are_being_used_by_which_applications_across_your_ecosystem_-_survey_from_orcaconfig_2 Mapping Databases to Applications:

    Sometimes IT operations are asked simple sounding questions such as, “What are all the applications that use this database?” and vice versa, “Which databases support this application?” Once again, nearly one-third of respondents admitted, “We really don’t know which databases are being used by which applications. Wish we did.” Another 36 percent relied on scripting or other manual processes to get that answer.

     

    Is it reasonable (in 2017!) to still rely on scripting to get basic information about interrelationships between applications, databases and middleware? Is it acceptable to operators, managers and auditors simply do without this information? Will Visio and similar static files always provide up-to-date information that IT Operations needs?

    Automation & Error-Proofing

    Environment-Aware Releases
    When moving an application through pre-production stages and into production environments, Release Managers want to ensure that the new release will just work … as planned … drama free.  This requires among other things that

    1. the configurations are up to date and production-ready, and
    2. that those business-critical applications are promoted simultaneously with their production-level configurations.
    		  how_does_your_organization_achieve_environment_aware_releases_

     

    Thirty-eight percent of respondents said they relied on scripting and other manual processes to try to accomplish environment-aware releases.  To ensure ‘everyone is on the same page’ many organizations use multiple planning meetings, sharing and updating spreadsheets and SharePoint files with (hopefully) the latest configuration information. Even among this group, respondents commented that scripting just does not work well for them.

    scripting_does_not_work_well_for_environment_aware_releases_-_survey_from_orcaconfig

    Despite the security, compliance and performance implications of configuration and release problems, 15 percent of survey respondents admitted they “really don’t achieve environment-aware releases.”

    Scripting isn’t Free; IT Ops Needs More

    Scripting is quite naturally the go-to method for many application owners and IT Ops teams. The cost of scripting or even finding and fixing a scripting-based error hardly ever appears clearly in budgetary line items. In the moment, it can feel like it is free. But over time, maintaining scripts and homegrown tools can build a hidden but costly mountain of technical debt. It might well be worth these costs and risks if scripting effectively resolved ongoing operations needs such as ecosystem visibility and drama-free deployments. However, time and again our respondents said they lacked basic capabilities such as configuration drift detection, mapping applications to databases and middleware or ensuring environment-aware software releases.

    — Scott Turner