https://www.howtogeek.com We explain technology. Learn more with our articles, reviews, tips, and the best answers to your most pressing tech questions. Fri, 20 Oct 2023 21:20:55 GMT en-US hourly 60 There are plenty of password managers out there, but you've probably heard of Dashlane at least a few times, especially since advertisements for the service are pretty common. We gave the service a high score in our Dashlane password manager review, thanks to its simple design and autofill options. However, Dashlane has now become much worse if you are a free user.

]]> Fri, 20 Oct 2023 21:20:55 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/the-dashlane-password-manager-is-getting-worse/ Chromebooks can open most common video and audio files without downloading an external player, such as VLC Media Player from the Google Play Store. However, Google is now planning to drop two video formats from the list, as the company now deems them "uncommon legacy media formats."

]]> Mon, 16 Oct 2023 15:02:09 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/chromebook-mpeg4-avi-video-support-removal/ What first started as a small password manager component within Chrome has grown to become something bigger, as Google has sought to compete with the likes of 1Password and Bitwarden. Google's password manager is still not as feature-packed as some competitors, but it gets the job done, and if you're part of the Google ecosystem, it would be hard to not at least give it a shot. Now, Google is improving its password manager on the Google app on iPhone and iPad, letting you use the passwords you've stored there all around.

]]> Thu, 12 Oct 2023 15:42:25 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/google-app-on-iphone-is-now-a-better-password-manager/ Data breaches have happened over and over this past year, and they show no sign of slowing down. Maybe it's not your password (or maybe it was), but you never know when something important about you, such as your phone number or your social security number, makes its way into a data dump. But have you thought of the prospect of your DNA getting into a data dump? Well, that's not a remote prospect anymore.

]]> Tue, 10 Oct 2023 14:51:23 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/23andme-data-breach-2023/ Photoshop has been a paid app for years. It is a tremendously useful resource for designers and gets more and more useful every year since Creative Cloud was introduced. But also, you can only really use it if you have it downloaded. The prospect of a web version of Photoshop when it was first announced was exciting for some people, and now it's coming out of preview with some differences compared to when it was previously announced.

]]> Fri, 29 Sep 2023 14:42:55 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/photoshop-web-app-now-widely-available-with-ai-generation/ Most browsers nowadays are just using the same Chromium engine found in Google Chrome. That means most sites work the same in all Chromium-based browsers, since those sites are tested in the most in Chrome, but they might run into issues on Firefox or Safari. Google's web apps have been far from perfect on Firefox over the past few years, but now many of them are working better than ever in Mozilla's web browser, even Google Meet.

]]> Tue, 26 Sep 2023 21:13:48 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/google-meet-is-finally-being-fixed-on-mozilla-firefox/ ChatGPT has, so far, been known as the magical bot that can help you get answers to text-based queries. Even though it can make mistakes pretty often, it can also be helpful in some cases. For the most part, however, you could only interact with it via text. You typed in a query, and it would spell out an answer. Now, OpenAI is announcing a few different ways you can actually interact with it.

]]> Mon, 25 Sep 2023 21:01:48 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/chatgpt-is-getting-a-huge-upgrade/ The rise of the generative AI era has not come without its many controversies and concerns, especially the image-generating side of it. Image generation tools like Stable Diffusion and DALL-E rely on a database of human-made art, most of which was indexed without the artist's knowledge. OpenAI has released the latest version of DALL-E, DALL-E 3, and it's trying to toe the line between better image generation and respecting the artists that make it possible.

]]> Wed, 20 Sep 2023 21:13:19 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/dall-e-3-reveal/ Over the last couple of decades, our email experience has remained basically the same. Sure, we now have prettier email contents and stuff like that, but there hasn't been anything that has actually radically changed the way we use our email. That is, at least, until AI came into play. Shortwave, which recently added an Android app, is now getting into the AI game with a new, conversational generative AI assistant.

]]> Wed, 20 Sep 2023 16:00:29 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/shortwave-email-is-adding-an-ai-assistant-for-your-inbox/ Passkeys might be the future of online authentications. Many security breaches and incidents are related to passwords, so if there was a reliable way to get rid of them, online security could get a lot easier, and password managers have been slowly but surely adding support for passkeys. 1Password is one of them, and now, the password manager is finally rolling out mobile support for passkeys.

]]> Wed, 20 Sep 2023 13:00:32 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/1password-is-adding-mobile-support-for-passkeys/ Google's Workspace apps are excellent for getting work done, especially if you need to get work done between multiple people. It's completely free to use, and its collaboration features are pretty much unmatched. You can currently see in real time what parts of a document others are looking over or editing, but what if you want to take things a step further? Google Slides, the company's software for editing presentation slides, is now getting a new addition: live pointers.

]]> Tue, 19 Sep 2023 15:02:02 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/google-slides-will-show-you-everyones-mouse-cursors/ The Unicode Consortium is the group that organizes and defines new Unicode characters and emoji, and at least once a year, it releases an update that defines which new emoji should be implemented on all platforms. Now, Unicode 15.1 is adding a few more emoji, which should arrive on your PC and mobile devices at some point in the future.

]]> Fri, 15 Sep 2023 19:09:39 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/unicode-151-will-add-new-emoji-to-your-phone-and-pc/ Emoji are great, but you only really have a few thousand of them until they run out. You do get new emoji every year, but why stick with the defaults? Google thought of a great idea a long time ago — what if you could merge two emoji together and use them as stickers on apps? This is exactly the concept that drives the Emoji Kitchen, a project Google is really, really committed to. Now, it's not just available on Google's Gboard anymore.

]]> Fri, 15 Sep 2023 17:22:45 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/googles-emoji-kitchen-is-not-just-on-your-keyboard-now/ Amazon is doing a lot these days, but first and foremost, it has always been an online retailer. The platform is the go-to spot for buying basically anything you want and having it delivered to your doorstep, though there is an awful lot of junk and scams. Now, Amazon is trying to make it easier to find what you're looking for, with improvements to product searching.

]]> Fri, 15 Sep 2023 16:54:38 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/amazon-is-rolling-out-better-search-features/ Google really, really wants you to play games on Chromebooks. One small problem with them, however, is that they lack the kind of hardware found in gaming PCs, and gaming laptops. So Google has pivoted towards another up-and-coming solution — cloud gaming. Even though the company killed off its Google Stadia cloud gaming platform, it has still supported other platforms by other companies. And it has even released gaming Chromebooks complete with RGB. Now, if you want to give cloud gaming a spin, Google is letting you get free access to GeForce Now.

]]> Thu, 31 Aug 2023 20:58:20 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/nvidia-geforce-now-chromebook-offer/ GitHub Actions is a powerful CI/CD tool for running automated builds from your GitHub repository. The last step of this process is deployment, which involves uploading the build artifacts somewhere they can be accessed easily. AWS S3 is the storage of choice for many people, and is easy to integrate with Actions scripts.

]]> Fri, 14 Jul 2023 05:00:20 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-upload-to-amazon-s3-from-github-actions/ AWS Lambda functions are a serverless solution for running code in the cloud without setting up your own servers. The primary downside is that initialization times can be high, leading to increased latency. With Provisioned Concurrency, you can solve this issue.

]]> Sun, 09 Jul 2023 06:00:49 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-optimize-aws-lambda-functions-with-provisioned-concurrency-auto-scaling/ Lambda functions are a crucial part of any serverless deployment on Amazon Web Services. However, they aren't magic, and can come with a few downsides, like cold starts, due to the physical limitations of the hardware. Provisioned Concurrency can help alleviate the problem.

]]> Fri, 07 Jul 2023 06:00:38 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/should-you-use-provisioned-concurrency-for-aws-lambda-functions/ Every website needs a domain name, and while there are lots of other things that go into running your site, the domain should be one of the first things you think about. Luckily, modern services make registering and managing domain names fairly easy.

]]> Tue, 04 Jul 2023 06:00:01 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-buy-a-domain-name-for-your-website/ GitHub as a platform is used by individual programmers and huge organizations alike. Regardless of how many people you're working with though, "GitHub Organizations" present some nice tools for people managing multiple projects.

]]> Mon, 03 Jul 2023 06:00:56 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/what-are-github-organizations-and-should-you-use-one/ One of the challenges with any DevOps workflow is managing secrets, passwords, and tokens that must be kept private for security reasons. This is especially true for open source repositories, where code is typically public. GitHub Secrets help manage this issue when working with GitHub Actions scripts.

]]> Sun, 02 Jul 2023 06:02:49 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/what-are-github-secrets-and-how-do-you-use-them/ Kubernetes Pods can freely communicate with each other by default. This poses a security risk when your cluster's used for multiple applications or teams. Errant behavior or malicious access in one Pod could direct traffic to the other Pods in your cluster.

]]> Tue, 06 Dec 2022 01:48:51 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/securing-kubernetes-cluster-traffic-with-pod-network-policies/ Server-Side Apply (SSA) has been generally available in Kubernetes since the v1.22 release in August 2021. It's a strategy for declarative resource management that improves diff calculations and warns about merge conflicts by moving the logic of the kubectl apply command onto the server.

]]> Wed, 30 Nov 2022 01:48:00 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/what-is-kubernetes-server-side-apply-ssa/ Managing the resources available to your Pods and containers is a best practice step for Kubernetes administration. You need to prevent Pods from greedily consuming your cluster's CPU and memory. Excess utilization by one set of Pods can cause resource contention that slows down neighboring containers and destabilizes your hosts.

]]> Tue, 15 Nov 2022 01:48:07 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/should-you-set-kubernetes-cpu-limits/ Kubernetes support for stateful applications has considerably matured over the past few years. Now it's viable to locate your database inside your cluster, allowing it to benefit from the same scalability as your other workloads.

]]> Wed, 09 Nov 2022 01:48:35 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-run-mysql-on-kubernetes-with-oracles-operator/ Pod scheduling issues are one of the most common Kubernetes errors. There are several reasons why a new Pod can get stuck in a Pending state with FailedScheduling as its reason. A Pod that displays this status won't start any containers so you'll be unable to use your application.

]]> Thu, 03 Nov 2022 00:48:37 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-debug-kubernetes-failedscheduling-errors/ Taints and tolerations are a Kubernetes mechanism for controlling how Pods schedule to the Nodes in your cluster. Taints are applied to Nodes and act as a repelling barrier against new Pods. Tainted Nodes will only accept Pods that have been marked with a corresponding toleration.

]]> Fri, 28 Oct 2022 00:48:18 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-use-kubernetes-taints-and-tolerations-to-avoid-undesirable-scheduling/ Development and Operations are two kinds of role facilitating the delivery of software systems. Most organizations building software at scale will employ people in both these disciplines. Dev and Ops aren't completely siloed though. It's common for the teams to overlap and achieve a higher throughput.

]]> Wed, 26 Oct 2022 00:48:45 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/development-vs-operations-where-do-dev-and-ops-roles-differ-and-overlap/ Cloud native describes an approach to software development where cloud infrastructure is used to achieve quicker and more scalable deployments. Cloud native applications are designed to take full advantage of modern engineering practices such as automation, managed services, and automatic scaling controls.

]]> Thu, 20 Oct 2022 00:48:13 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/7-cloud-native-development-principles-for-maximum-efficiency/ Kubernetes is a complex system with many moving parts. Correct configuration rules are essential for your service to operate reliably. Errors can occur when you write Kubernetes manifests by hand without a comprehensive review process.

]]> Tue, 18 Oct 2022 00:48:35 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-use-datree-to-avoid-kubernetes-misconfigurations/ An "error budget" describes the amount of time a system can be offline before it has tangible consequences for your business. Error budgets are used alongside service level agreements (SLAs) and service level objectives (SLOs) to inform organizations when a system's unavailability has tipped into a breach of contract.

]]> Sat, 15 Oct 2022 00:48:42 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-use-error-budgets-to-protect-service-reliability/ Kubeadm is the official tool for installing and maintaining a cluster that's based on the default Kubernetes distribution. Created clusters don't automatically upgrade themselves and disabling package updates for Kubernetes components is part of the set up process. This means you have to manually migrate your cluster when a new Kubernetes release arrives.

]]> Fri, 14 Oct 2022 00:48:07 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-upgrade-a-kubernetes-cluster-created-with-kubeadm/ KVM is a virtualization technology that's integrated into the Linux kernel. You can create virtual machines and interact with KVM using tools such as virsh, virt-manager, and GNOME Boxes.

]]> Thu, 13 Oct 2022 00:48:09 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-increase-a-kvm-virtual-machines-disk-size/ Grafana is an open-source observability platform for creating dashboards that visualize datasets. You can use it to conveniently monitor server statistics such as CPU consumption, network throughput, and uptime.

]]> Sat, 08 Oct 2022 00:48:09 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-set-up-a-simple-grafana-cloud-monitoring-dashboard-for-your-linux-server/ Kubernetes StatefulSets are used to deploy stateful applications inside your cluster. Each Pod in the StatefulSet can access local persistent volumes that stick to it even after it's rescheduled. This allows Pods to maintain individual state that's separate from their neighbors in the set.

]]> Fri, 07 Oct 2022 00:48:42 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-resize-a-kubernetes-statefulsets-volumes/ SRE stands for Site Reliability Engineering. It builds upon the principles of DevOps to bring an engineering-led approach to IT operations. SRE uses software to automate system operation, identify problems, and implement resolutions.

]]> Thu, 06 Oct 2022 00:48:23 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/what-is-sre-how-does-it-relate-to-devops/ StatefulSets are Kubernetes objects used to consistently deploy stateful application components. Pods created as part of a StatefulSet are given persistent identifiers that they retain even when they're rescheduled.

]]> Wed, 05 Oct 2022 00:48:54 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/what-are-kubernetes-statefulsets-when-should-you-use-them/ SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS are three common terms that describe different kinds of service-based computing. In each case companies consume IT resources on-demand from external cloud providers, instead of purchasing physical assets like hardware equipment and software licenses outright.

]]> Sat, 01 Oct 2022 00:48:25 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/saas-paas-and-iaas-whats-the-difference-and-which-should-you-use/ The Kubernetes API is your route to inspecting and managing your cluster's operations. You can consume the API using the Kubectl CLI, tools such as curl, or the official integration libraries for popular programming languages.

]]> Fri, 30 Sep 2022 00:48:05 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-access-your-kubernetes-clusters-api-from-within-your-pods/ Role-based access control (RBAC) is a mechanism for defining the actions that user accounts can perform within your Kubernetes cluster. Enabling RBAC reduces the risk associated with credential theft and account takeover. Issuing each user with the minimum set of permissions they require prevents accounts from becoming over privileged.

]]> Thu, 29 Sep 2022 00:48:36 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-get-started-with-kubernetes-rbac/ Continuous integration and delivery pipelines (CI/CD) automate software development processes by running tests and compilations each time you change your code. CI/CD is one of the main components of effective DevOps methodologies, where code authorship is combined with IT operations and quality assurance functions to create more holistic workflows.

]]> Sat, 24 Sep 2022 00:48:25 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/5-pain-points-that-limit-cicd-pipeline-success/ Kubernetes v1.24 and later releases ship without Dockershim after its deprecation in December 2020's v1.20 release. Dockershim's no longer available as a built-in container runtime. You need to use a different supported runtime instead, such as containerd, CRI-O, or Docker Engine with the

]]> Wed, 21 Sep 2022 00:48:14 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/kubernetes-v1.24-how-to-migrate-away-from-dockershim/ Kubernetes has a reputation for complexity but modern releases are relatively straightforward to set up. The official cluster administration tool Kubeadm provides an automated experience for booting your control plane and registering worker nodes.

]]> Sat, 17 Sep 2022 00:48:43 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-start-a-kubernetes-cluster-from-scratch-with-kubeadm-and-kubectl/ K3d is an open-source wrapper around the Rancher/SUSE K3s Kubernetes distribution that lets you run the control plane inside Docker. The entire stack runs in Docker, giving you a fully containerized cluster that's lightweight and easy to set up.

]]> Thu, 15 Sep 2022 00:48:55 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/running-a-kubernetes-cluster-in-docker-with-k3d/ Apache is one of the most popular web servers but its default configuration contains questionable choices on many Linux distributions. Apache tends to advertise its specific version and the platform it's running on, information that could be valuable to attackers.

]]> Wed, 14 Sep 2022 00:48:58 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-hide-apaches-version-number-and-operating-system-information/ Kubernetes is the leading orchestrator for distributing container instances across multiple physical nodes. The nodes are managed by the Kubernetes control plane, a collection of components which maintain the cluster's state, respond to changing conditions, and handle scheduling decisions.

]]> Tue, 13 Sep 2022 00:48:56 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/what-happens-during-a-kubernetes-control-plane-failure/ Infra App is a desktop Kubernetes client for Windows, macOS, and Linux. It offers a clean and simple UI that lets you monitor clusters and inspect the resources within them.

]]> Fri, 26 Aug 2022 00:48:35 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/managing-kubernetes-from-your-desktop-with-infra-app/ The JSON Web Tokens (JWT) standard describes a compact method for verifiable data transfers. Each token contains a signature that allows the issuing party to check the message's integrity.

]]> Fri, 19 Aug 2022 00:48:29 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/what-are-json-web-tokens-jwts-why-do-apis-use-them/ Garbage collection is the process by which Kubernetes removes dependent objects after you delete a resource. It also handles automatic clean-up of redundant items in your cluster. Finished containers and disused images are periodically removed to prevent large numbers of unnecessary resources accumulating over time.

]]> Wed, 17 Aug 2022 08:04:36 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/understanding-and-configuring-kubernetes-garbage-collection/ Grafana is a popular open-source observability solution that lets you visualize metrics on graphical dashboards. Grafana has connectors for a broad selection of data sources including time series databases, search engines, and individual applications. In this article you'll learn how to use Grafana to set up simple monitoring for a MySQL database server using the official Grafana Cloud integration.

]]> Wed, 17 Aug 2022 00:48:22 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-monitor-mysql-server-activity-with-a-grafana-dashboard/ GitLab's Rails console provides an interactive terminal that lets you directly manipulate data in your GitLab instance. You can use it to extract information, troubleshoot problems, and perform advanced administration tasks that aren't supported in the GitLab web UI or API.

]]> Tue, 16 Aug 2022 06:02:09 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-get-started-with-gitlabs-rails-console-for-advanced-administration/ DevOps is an approach to software delivery that integrates the development process with service operation tasks. Effective DevOps implementations facilitate greater throughput by increasing efficiency and cutting down silos between teams.

]]> Sat, 13 Aug 2022 06:02:00 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/what-tools-do-you-need-to-achieve-effective-devops/ Monitoring the resource usage of your Kubernetes cluster is essential so you can track performance and understand whether your workloads are operating efficiently. The kubectl top command streams metrics directly from your cluster, letting you access the basics in your terminal.

]]> Fri, 12 Aug 2022 22:00:35 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-monitor-kubernetes-resource-usage-with-metrics-server-and-kubectl-top/ Load balancers are infrastructure components which distribute incoming network traffic between multiple backend servers. They improve capacity and add redundancy by keeping services accessible if one of your servers fails.

]]> Thu, 11 Aug 2022 06:02:00 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/what-are-load-balancers-how-to-effectively-distribute-incoming-traffic/ Functions is one of the newest additions to the DigitalOcean cloud platform. It provides a first-class method for developing serverless functions without leaving DigitalOcean. Your code's executed on-demand when it's called, eliminating manual server provisioning and maintenance.

]]> Wed, 10 Aug 2022 22:00:17 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-get-started-with-digitaloceans-serverless-functions/ DigitalOcean's Managed Kubernetes service simplifies provisioning and maintaining Kubernetes clusters. The platform provides a ready-to-use foundation for containerized workloads with one-click support for common addon applications.

]]> Tue, 09 Aug 2022 08:04:47 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-set-up-an-nginx-ingress-controller-on-digitalocean-kubernetes/ K3s is a lightweight Kubernetes distribution ideal for development use. It's now part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) but was originally developed by Rancher.

]]> Mon, 08 Aug 2022 06:02:05 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-use-k3s-to-run-a-kubernetes-cluster-on-your-development-machine/ Kubernetes Jobs create Pods repeatedly until a specified number of containers terminate successfully. Jobs are often used with the higher-level CronJob mechanism that automatically starts new Jobs on a recurring schedule.

]]> Sun, 07 Aug 2022 08:04:00 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-clean-up-old-kubernetes-jobs/ "As code" software development approaches have transformed how teams design, build, and deploy new solutions. The methodology sees all aspects of a system stored as versioned files in a source repository. Everything from project specs to network routing rules is treated similarly to the actual code.

]]> Fri, 29 Jul 2022 06:02:00 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-everything-as-code-transforms-software-delivery/ Applications running in Kubernetes are normally long-lived services that you don't need to interact with. Sometimes you might want to manually run a command inside a container though, perhaps for a one-off maintenance operation or to assist a debugging procedure.

]]> Thu, 28 Jul 2022 06:02:00 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-run-commands-inside-kubernetes-pod-containers/ Init containers are a Kubernetes mechanism for initializing new Pods. Init containers start and exit before their Pod's main application containers, providing a chance to run bootstrap scripts in sequential order.

]]> Wed, 27 Jul 2022 08:04:00 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/what-are-kubernetes-init-containers-and-when-should-you-use-them/ Kubernetes has become one of the most popular ways to run containerized workloads in production. It simplifies deploying, scaling, and maintaining the containers that run your service.

]]> Mon, 25 Jul 2022 10:40:00 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/why-you-should-use-kubernetes-for-your-development-environments/ Kubernetes container lifecycle hooks let you respond to container creations and terminations. You can handle events by running a command inside the container or making an HTTP request to an endpoint it exposes.

]]> Mon, 25 Jul 2022 08:04:00 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-use-kubernetes-hooks-to-track-container-lifecycles/ Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) are Kubernetes API extensions which can define new object types. Pods, ReplicaSets, ConfigMaps, and Ingresses are examples of common built-in resources. CRDs let you add entirely new types to this list, then manage them using familiar Kubernetes tools such as Kubectl.

]]> Sat, 23 Jul 2022 08:04:00 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/what-are-kubernetes-custom-resource-definitions-crds/ Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes workloads. Creating a Helm chart for your application simplifies reproducible deployments into a Kubernetes cluster. Users can install the whole chart with one command, instead of manually applying individual component manifests with Kubectl.

]]> Fri, 15 Jul 2022 08:04:00 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-get-started-writing-helm-charts-for-your-kubernetes-applications/ Kubectl contexts are a mechanism for quickly switching between different clusters, users, and namespaces within the CLI. They make it easier to move between multiple environments without changing your active Kubectl config file.

]]> Thu, 30 Jun 2022 14:01:06 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-simplify-kubernetes-management-with-kubectl-contexts/ Stern is an open-source tool that makes it easier to stream real-time Kubernetes logs to your terminal. You can use Stern to monitor logs from multiple containers simultaneously, giving you a combined view of activity inside Pods.

]]> Tue, 28 Jun 2022 18:25:30 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-monitor-kubernetes-pod-logs-in-real-time-with-stern/ Kubectx and Kubens are two tools which accelerate your Kubernetes management experience. They address some of the shortcomings of Kubectl by making it quicker and more convenient to switch between cluster environments.

]]> Tue, 28 Jun 2022 14:24:58 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-quickly-switch-kubernetes-contexts-with-kubectx-and-kubens/ Containerization has transformed how new applications are developed and deployed. However many organizations retain a back catalog of older systems that necessitate a different approach. This disconnect between new and old doesn't have to be perpetuated: you can package older systems as containers too, making it easier to continue evolving them with more modern development methods.

]]> Mon, 27 Jun 2022 15:36:58 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-containerize-a-legacy-application/ GitLab is a leading platform for hosting Git repositories, CI pipelines, and DevOps workflows. It's available as a SaaS offering on GitLab.com or as a self-managed distribution for private use on your own hardware.

]]> Mon, 21 Mar 2022 09:00:40 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-deploy-a-gitlab-server-with-docker/ Grafana is a leading observability platform for metrics visualization. It lets you build bespoke dashboards to surface meaningful insights from your application's real-time data streams.

]]> Sat, 19 Mar 2022 11:00:43 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-run-grafana-in-a-docker-container/ GitOps is a development methodology that advocates using versioned files in source control repositories to define and manage your infrastructure. Expressing your architecture as declarative files provides a way to inspect your system's current configuration, merge changes from multiple contributors, and rollback to an earlier state.

]]> Fri, 18 Mar 2022 16:05:29 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/what-is-agent-based-gitops-and-how-does-it-differ-from-ci-cd/ AWS bills everything by the meter, so if you experience unexpected usage, you're going to have to pay for it. AWS has alarms that can trigger if your bill gets too high.

]]> Mon, 14 Mar 2022 11:00:04 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/dont-drain-your-wallet-how-to-set-up-aws-billing-alarms-budgets/ DigitalOcean Spaces is an object storage service that's compatible with the Amazon S3 APIs. Spaces includes an integrated CDN that you can enable at no extra cost. It improves performance by delivering your content from the closest servers to your users.

]]> Sun, 13 Mar 2022 11:00:21 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-use-digitalocean-spaces-as-a-cdn/ Kubernetes is a distributed system that's designed to scale replicas of your services across multiple physical environments. In many cases this works well out-of-the-box. The Kubernetes scheduler automatically places your Pods (container instances) onto Nodes (worker machines) that have enough resources to support them.

]]> Fri, 11 Mar 2022 12:00:46 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/what-is-pod-affinity-and-anti-affinity-in-kubernetes/ The Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX) specification defines an open standard for communicating information about software components. SPDX is used to create Software Bill of Material lists (SBOMs), encapsulate licensing and copyright details, and provide package metadata such as version identifiers and known vulnerabilities.

]]> Thu, 10 Mar 2022 21:00:22 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/what-is-the-spdx-standard-and-how-is-it-helping-the-software-industry/ CloudFoundry and Kubernetes are two open-source technologies used to run applications in the cloud. Selecting the right platform for your deployments is an important choice to maximize performance, maintainability, and the productivity of your developers.

]]> Thu, 10 Mar 2022 11:00:09 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/cloudfoundry-vs-kubernetes-which-cloud-platform-should-you-choose/ DigitalOcean's Container Registry gives you a private space in the cloud to store and distribute your Docker images. As well as offering an image repository, the service also integrates into DigitalOcean's other services. You can deploy stored images to App Platform and use them with your Managed Kubernetes clusters.

]]> Thu, 10 Mar 2022 10:00:38 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-push-and-pull-docker-images-with-digitaloceans-container-registry/ DigitalOcean's Floating IPs are a way of reserving public IP addresses that are independent of your compute resources. They provide a way to rapidly reroute traffic between your assets without waiting for DNS changes to take effect.

]]> Tue, 15 Feb 2022 20:57:33 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/what-are-floating-ips-in-digitalocean/ GitLab CI's Variables system lets you inject data into your CI job environments. You can use variables to supply config values, create reusable pipelines, and avoid hardcoding sensitive information into your

]]> Fri, 11 Feb 2022 15:23:22 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-set-variables-in-your-gitlab-ci-pipelines/ Grafana is an open-source observability platform for visualizing metrics, logs, and traces collected from your applications. It's a cloud-native solution for quickly assembling data dashboards that let you inspect and analyze your stack.

]]> Tue, 08 Feb 2022 18:18:45 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/what-is-grafana-and-when-should-you-use-it/ GitOps describes a way of operating and managing software using methodologies rooted in the Git version control system. Use of GitOps-based workflows makes it easier to develop, deploy, maintain, and collaborate on software by requiring the system's characteristics to be defined as files in a Git repository.

]]> Tue, 08 Feb 2022 18:18:11 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/understanding-the-opengitops-principles-for-better-software-workflows/ Handshake domains are a new type of DNS system that many domain name providers are starting to offer. It runs on the same blockchain technology that powers Bitcoin and Ethereum, and has the potential to decentralize the web. But is it worth your time?

]]> Fri, 28 Jan 2022 16:35:47 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/handshake-domains-blockchain-powered-dns-is-here-but-should-you-use-it/ Kubernetes has seen a surge of adoption over the past few years as companies have pivoted towards containers and cloud-native deployment methods. The platform's become the leading orchestration solution for running containers in production. This means people who are skilled in using and managing Kubernetes clusters are now in-demand across the industry.

]]> Fri, 28 Jan 2022 14:46:10 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/should-you-learn-kubernetes/ Kubernetes is usually described as a declarative system. Most of the time you work with YAML that defines what the end state of the system should look like. Kubernetes supports imperative APIs too though, where you issue a command and get an immediate output.

]]> Fri, 28 Jan 2022 14:45:05 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/declarative-vs-imperative-kubernetes-object-management/ Traefik is a leading reverse proxy and load balancer for cloud-native operations and containerized workloads. It functions as an edge router that publishes your services to the internet.

]]> Mon, 24 Jan 2022 14:20:43 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-route-traffic-to-docker-containers-with-traefik-reverse-proxy/ A Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) is a specific form of identifier which can be safely deemed unique for most practical purposes. Two correctly generated UUIDs have a virtually negligible chance of being identical, even if they're created in two different environments by separate parties. This is why UUIDs are said to be universally unique.

]]> Tue, 18 Jan 2022 23:41:35 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/what-are-uuids-and-why-are-they-useful/ Kubernetes object deletions aren't as straightforward as they seem on the surface. Deleting an object is an involved process that includes conditional checks to determine whether safe removal is possible. This is achieved by API objects called Finalizers.

]]> Mon, 10 Jan 2022 14:14:30 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/what-are-finalizers-in-kubernetes-how-to-handle-object-deletions/ A common use case for EC2 On-Demand and Spot Instances is using powerful machines for short-term, one-off tasks. However, if you were to leave these machines running on accident, you may end up with a very large bill. Luckily, AWS has tools to prevent that.

]]> Tue, 21 Dec 2021 15:00:38 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-automatically-turn-off-aws-ec2-instances/ Spot instances are AWS's way to sell off unused server capacity when demand isn't high. They are much cheaper, but come with a lot of restrictions, such as being interruptable and more complicated to start, stop, and run for longer periods of time.

]]> Mon, 20 Dec 2021 13:34:38 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-stop-and-start-aws-ec2-spot-instances/ Prometheus is an open-source monitoring solution for collecting and aggregating metrics as time series data. Put more simply, each item in a Prometheus store is a metric event accompanied by the timestamp it occurred.

]]> Fri, 17 Dec 2021 14:07:07 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/what-is-prometheus-and-why-is-it-so-popular/ AWS's Simple Storage Service (S3) is great for storing large amounts of objects, but it's also an API that's compatible with many other competiting services. If you want to move off AWS, transferring an S3 bucket is easy to do.

]]> Thu, 16 Dec 2021 11:00:57 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-migrate-an-aws-s3-bucket-to-another-account-or-service/ Kubernetes v1.23 is the last major release of 2021. The latest update to the leading container orchestration platform promotes 11 features to the stable channel, marking them as suitable for general use. Here's what you need to know before you upgrade.

]]> Tue, 14 Dec 2021 12:30:56 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/whats-new-in-kubernetes-v1-23/ The Kubernetes terms "controller" and "operator" refer to two different patterns that transition a cluster into a desired state. Controllers are an established concept whereas Operators have emerged more recently to describe application-specific controllers.

]]> Tue, 14 Dec 2021 12:00:17 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/what-are-kubernetes-controllers-and-operators/ Single Sign-On and zero trust networks depend on securely passing identification details back and forth between users, identity providers, and service providers. SAML is the glue that lets that happen.

]]> Wed, 24 Nov 2021 13:00:46 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-the-saml-standard-provides-single-sign-on-services/ Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) provides a very useful interface for storing objects in redudant cloud storage, where you don't have to worry about the underlying hardware. On top of being a service offered by Amazon, it's also an industry standard API, and there are many services compatible with it.

]]> Wed, 24 Nov 2021 12:45:55 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/should-you-use-an-s3-alternative-for-object-storage/ DigitalOcean droplets possess metadata that reveal information about the compute instance and its environment. You can supply your own arbitrary data to make custom values accessible from inside your droplet.

]]> Tue, 23 Nov 2021 12:00:10 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-access-and-use-digitalocean-droplet-metadata/ Kubernetes Pods should operate without intervention but sometimes you might hit a problem where a container's not working the way it should. Restarting the Pod can help restore operations to normal.

]]> Wed, 17 Nov 2021 10:00:38 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-restart-kubernetes-pods-with-kubectl/ DevSpace is an open-source tool that helps developers quickly deploy cloud-native applications to Kubernetes clusters. It abstracts away much of the traditional Kubernetes complexity so you can get back to writing code.

]]> Mon, 15 Nov 2021 13:00:26 GMT https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-get-started-with-devspace-and-rapidly-develop-kubernetes-apps/