5 Essential Tools in Your CloudOps Strategy

What Is CloudOps?

CloudOps is a term used to describe the set of processes, tools, and practices used to manage and operate cloud computing environments. This includes tasks such as provisioning and scaling resources, monitoring and troubleshooting issues, and managing security and compliance. CloudOps teams are responsible for ensuring that their organization's cloud-based applications and services are available, performant, and secure.

Some benefits of CloudOps include:

Application Mapping: 5 Key Benefits for Software Projects

Application Dependency Mapping is the process of creating a graphical representation of the relationships and dependencies between different components of a software application. This includes dependencies between modules, libraries, services, and databases. It helps to understand the impact of changes in one component on other parts of the application and aids in troubleshooting, testing, and deployment.

Software Dependency Risks

Dependencies are often necessary for building complex software applications. However, development teams should be mindful of dependencies and seek to minimize their number and complexity for several reasons:

Security Operations Center Trends for 2023

What Is a Security Operations Center and What Does It Do?

A Security Operations Center (SOC) includes the people, processes, and technology responsible for monitoring, analyzing, and maintaining the security of an organization's IT systems. 

The SOC acts as a hub that collects data from an organization's networks, servers, endpoints, and other digital assets and uses automated and manual processes to detect cybersecurity threats, prioritize potential cybersecurity incidents, and effectively respond.

Top 5 Network Security Risks in 2023

Network security refers to the technologies, processes, and policies used to protect networks, network traffic, and network-accessible assets from cyberattacks, unauthorized access, and data loss. Organizations of all sizes need network security to protect their critical assets and infrastructure.

Modern network security takes a layered approach to protect the many edges of the network and the network perimeter. Any element of the network could be an entry point for attackers—endpoint devices, data paths, applications, or users. Because organizations face numerous potential threats, it is common to deploy multiple network security controls designed to address different types of threats at different layers of the network and infrastructure. This is called a defense in-depth security approach.

5 Kubernetes Lens Alternatives

What Is Kubernetes Lens?

Lens is an open-source integrated development environment (IDE) that allows users to connect and manage multiple Kubernetes clusters on Mac, Windows, and Linux platforms. It provides a feature-rich, intuitive graphical interface that allows users to deploy and manage clusters directly from the console. 

Kubernetes Lens provides built-in dashboards that provide key metrics and insights into resources running on a Kubernetes cluster, including deployment, configuration, networking, storage, access control, and custom resources.

Model Drift in Computer Vision Models: Understanding the Problem

What Is a Computer Vision Model?

Computer vision (CV) is a field within artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) that involves computer programs interpreting the meaning of image and video inputs. A computer vision algorithm can analyze specific criteria in visual data and use its interpretations to implement predictive and decision-making tasks.

Modern computer vision models are highly sophisticated and cover many use cases to automate critical decision-making systems and enhance business efficiency. As a type of machine learning algorithm, computer vision models are challenging to deploy.

Adding SAST to Your CI/CD Pipeline: What You Should Know

What Is a CI/CD Pipeline? 

As custom applications become a key differentiator for enterprises, speed of code release has become a competitive advantage, and CI/CD pipelines are what make high-velocity development possible.

A continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline is the process that drives software development through the stages of building, testing, and deploying code. By automating the process, teams can minimize human error and maintain a consistent process for software releases. The pipeline includes tools such as code compilation, unit testing, code analysis, security, and binary generation. For containerized environments, this pipeline also includes ways to package code into container images and deploy them to a cloud environment.

Managing Application Dependencies in the Cloud: Strategies and Best Practices

What Is Application Dependency Mapping?

Application dependency mapping (ADM) enables you to create a comprehensive map of the entire ecosystem. It helps avoid blind spots that allow mistakes or breaches to occur. ADM solutions can identify and map all instances, applications, and communication channels across the ecosystem, including ports and services. 

There are various ADM solutions, including vendor native, open source, and commercial vendor-agnostic tools. A vendor-agnostic solution can quickly and easily identify subnets, VPCs, and security groups on several cloud providers like Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Creating Your Own Face Dataset with DatasetGAN and GPUs

What Are Face Datasets?

Image datasets include digital images chosen especially to help test, train, and evaluate the performance of ML and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, typically computer vision algorithms. Specifically, face datasets include images of human faces, curated for machine learning (ML) projects. See a list of commonly used face datasets.

A face dataset includes faces shown in a variety of lighting conditions, emotions, poses, ethnicity, gender, age, and other factors. Face datasets are key enablers of face recognition, a computer vision field applicable to various use cases, such as augmented reality (AR), personal device security, and video surveillance. 

Is DevSecOps Compatible With Managed Detection and Response?

What Is DevSecOps?

DevSecOps is a collaborative effort by developers, security, and operations teams to get products to market securely and efficiently. This hybrid development and security model aims to address flaws that arise from the relegation of security to the end of the development process. It helps teams avoid rewriting buggy code, releasing insecure products, and increasing time to production.

When an organization implements the DevSecOps model, it provides the operations and development teams with tools and processes to help them make security decisions. At the same time, security teams align these tools and processes with the needs of the DevOps teams to enable agile workflows. Transitioning to a DevSecOps team is not easy, but team members can simplify their collaboration with the right tools.

Is SASE the Solution for Third-Party Risk?

What Is SASE?

Secure access service edge (SASE) is a network security architecture that helps securely connect systems, endpoints, and users to services and applications from any location worldwide. It is a service you can access from the cloud and manage centrally. 

SASE is a framework, not a specific technology. It works by combining several cloud-native security technologies, including: 

Open Source Security Risks

What Are Open-Source Vulnerabilities?

While open-source software drives rapid innovation, it introduces many challenges. On the one hand, it provides developers with ready-made software to add functionality to existing applications or even use it as the foundation for a new product. However, it also introduces security risks.

Open-source security has become a cornerstone of modern application security. Open-source vulnerabilities emerge when open-source software contains or creates security risks. A vulnerability may occur due to careless integration of components, lack of security functionality, poorly written code, and malicious code. Threat actors exploit open source vulnerabilities to launch various attacks, which enable them to abuse resources, steal data, and damage systems.

Kubernetes Performance Tuning: Make the Most of Your Clusters

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Why Is Kubernetes Performance Tuning Needed?

As Kubernetes becomes a basic infrastructure for many organizations, performance tuning for Kubernetes clusters is becoming more important. Kubernetes is a highly scalable open-source platform for orchestrating containerized workloads in server environments. It enables declarative configuration and automation of computing resources.

Cloud Pricing Comparison: AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud

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AWS vs Azure vs Google: An Overview

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s leading cloud computing platform. It provides Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings. AWS services can provide organizations with on-demand computing power, storage, application services, and content delivery services.

Data Classification With AWS Macie: Step by Step

What Is Amazon Macie?

Amazon Macie is a fully-managed data classification service that helps monitor your information. It uses machine learning technology to continuously analyze and classify content in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets. 

After you activate Macie, the service starts scanning the contents of your S3 buckets. The initial scan helps establish a baseline of the data, including details on who accesses the data and with which protocols. Next, Macie inspects any request to access the data and provides visualizations on the dashboard. 

Getting Started With AWS Monitoring

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the most popular public cloud, with 175 services and counting. A key element of a successful cloud operation is gaining visibility into what is running where, what issues are occurring, and dealing with them, preferably automatically.

In this article, I’ll discuss the basics of AWS monitoring, including Amazon services that can assist with monitoring, key metrics to watch for the most popular Amazon services, and a special focus on monitoring EC2 environments, which are the basis for most Amazon deployments.

Confused by AWS Storage Options? S3, EBS, EFS Explained

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is well-known for its vast number of product offerings. There are (probably) a few AWS ninjas who know exactly how and when to use which Amazon product for what because they've earned this certification.  The rest of us are in need of help.

Specifically in the storage arena, AWS provides three popular services — S3, Elastic Block Store (EBS), and Elastic File System (EFS) — which work quite differently and offer different levels of performance, cost, availability, and scalability. We'll discuss the use cases of these storage options, and compare their performance, cost, and accessibility to stored data. But before diving in, you can also try out this free AWS storage skills assessment to see how your "IQ" stacks up against your peers.