The rapid proliferation and increased volume of data across industries has magnified the need for organizations to have a solid strategy in place for processing and managing real-time data. Improving overall data capabilities enables teams to operate more efficiently, and emerging technologies have even created a smoother pathway for bringing real-time data closer to business users, which plays a critical role in effective decision-making.
This Refcard focuses on architecture patterns for real-time data capabilities, beginning with an overview of data challenges, performance, and security and compliance. Readers will then dive into the key data architecture patterns — their components, advantages, and challenges — setting the stage for an example architecture, which demonstrates how to use open-source tools for a common real-time, high-volume data use case.
Today's cyber threat landscape necessitates a nuanced and proactive strategy for circumventing attacks due to the increasingly complex, sophisticated nature of threats. Security teams must not only have a solid understanding of the landscape but also have effective solutions for predicting and preempting security threats — those both known and unknown to their organization.
In this Refcard, you will learn about the evolving threat landscape, key challenges of emerging technologies, as well as basic and advanced threat detection techniques to integrate into your overall security strategy.
The increasingly distributed nature of CI/CD frameworks has made organizations more vulnerable to attacks, which can range from threats to supply chains and servers to exploitations of the application code itself. In this Refcard, you'll learn about the primary focus areas of CI/CD pipeline security, review common pipeline threats and security challenges, as well as walk through seven steps to get started with securing your pipelines.
Modern systems and applications span numerous architectures and technologies — they are also becoming increasingly more dynamic, distributed, and modular in nature. In order to support the availability and performance of their systems, IT operations and SRE teams need advanced monitoring capabilities. This Refcard reviews the four distinct levels of observability maturity, key functionality at each stage, and next steps organizations should take to enhance their monitoring practices.
Neural networks are the core of all AI algorithms, and today, deep neural networks are used in tasks ranging from image recognition and object detection to natural language processing and generation. After dissecting the basic building blocks that form a neural network and the principles of how they work, this Refcard delves into neural architecture types and their respective uses, neural network chips, and model optimization techniques at a high level.
With the amount of data produced on a daily basis continuing to rise, so too do the number of data points that companies collect. Apache Iceberg was developed as an open table format to help sift through large analytical datasets.
This Refcard introduces you to Apache Iceberg by taking you through the history of its inception, dives into key methods and techniques, and provides hands-on examples to help you get introduced to the Iceberg community.
With the exponential increase in container adoption, it's more critical than ever for teams to ensure that proper security and threat management infrastructure and practices are in place. This Refcard presents a comprehensive examination of threat detection for containerized environments, spanning several focus areas such as common cloud security architectures and Kubernetes hardening guidelines. And central to this Refcard are the fundamentals of container threat detection, including concepts like resource limits, static image vulnerability scanning, configuration validation, and much more.
As the threat landscape continuously evolves, it is crucial for organizations to adopt a shift left for security mindset — ensuring that security is prioritized and its importance equated to that of automation and collaboration among distributed teams.
In this Refcard, you’ll review the challenges associated with integrating security practices into a continuous delivery pipeline, including the blockers development teams in particular often face. Also covered are the key areas to consider when administering and maintaining security of CD pipelines.
The serverless model can free technical teams from the more monotonous development work, allowing them to focus on innovation. And using a serverless database to build cloud-native apps amplifies such benefits due to its ability to scale without being hindered by fragmented data across independently deployed services.
This Refcard dives straight into building a serverless Java web application. You'll find a list of tools needed to follow the tutorial as well as comprehensive step-by-step instructions, code snippets, and a companion repository for the sample serverless application.
Any application monitoring solution should maintain an open design, build upon proven technologies, be accessible, and require a low learning curve. The end goal is simple: provide teams with the ability to identify issues or unexpected behavior within minutes, if not seconds. The ELK Stack meets these expectations and more. In this Refcard, you'll cover the basic components of the ELK Stack, how it maps to a log analysis workflow, and step-by-step instructions for installation, configuration, and reporting.
Despite much progress in the testing framework space, creating automated tests can still require a significant amount of prerequisite coding knowledge. Automated testing solutions, particularly those based in the cloud, offer unique opportunities for teams across an organization — including developers, testers, and non-technical stakeholders. By abstracting large parts of the intricacies involved in automated test creation, each of these roles can align their approach specific to their skillset and needs.
Dive into the fundamentals of cloud-based test automation with this Refcard focused on advantages, considerations, and prominent tools: from code-based solutions to those offering low-code functionality and advanced capabilities like intelligent test automation.
Need help with your NoSQL migration? Look no further than our "NoSQL Migration Essentials" Refcard. We walk through the primary steps for moving out of a relational database, plus important design principles to understand and consider in your migration process.
Readers will review key concepts that range from denormalizing and modeling data to defining access patterns, designing primary keys and indexes, and creating an entity relationship diagram — all demonstrated with a simple site application example. As a bonus, readers can use the included JSON structure at the end to interact with a NoSQL playground.
Continuous integration and continuous delivery are crucial to the advancement of software development, and users can further reap both the business and practical benefits by integrating these concepts into their repositories. By far, the most prominent option available today is GitHub. In this Refcard, readers will learn the key concepts of GitHub Actions, as well as how to create automated workflows, or CI/CD pipelines, using text-based configurations that are stored directly within their GitHub repository.
To net the full benefits of a distributed system, applications' underlying architectures must achieve various company-level objectives including agility, velocity, and speed to market. Implementing a reliable observability strategy, plus the right tools for your specific business requirements, will give teams the insights needed to properly operate and manage their entire distributed ecosystem on an ongoing basis.
This Refcard covers the three pillars of observability — metrics, logs, and traces — and how they not only complement an organization's monitoring efforts but also work together to help profile, interpret, and optimize system-wide performance.
Automation of business processes enables organizations to better meet critical factors for success across industries today — from increased team agility and faster time-to-market to lower costs and improved customer service. However, many are hindered by the existing dependencies between their software, systems, and teams, making process automation and business efficiency all the more challenging to achieve and maintain.
This Refcard introduces a way to address such challenges using a microservice architectural style and a workflow engine for orchestration. You will learn key techniques in areas such as microservice design, communication, and state management, as well as first steps to take when getting started with business process automation.
Continuous configuration occurs when a configuration platform is used to automate, monitor, design, and manage otherwise manual processes, which are essential components of improving the overall efficiency and success of your team's SDLC. There are several areas to prioritize in a continuous configuration methodology — the right tools for building a continuous deployment pipeline, effective pipeline maintenance and management, and, of course, widespread automation.
In addition to covering key benefits of continuous configuration, our Refcard details specific concepts and foundations of this modern approach to DevOps, including build automation, infrastructure as code, configuration monitoring and management, enforcement in CI/CD processes, and more!
Container registries serve as libraries to store and access third-party container images required during the build phase of the SDLC and the images produced for deployment to test, staging, and production environments. While public container registries are accessible and convenient, private registries can better integrate into existing CI/CD workflows, offer greater control over access and security, as well as help ensure build repeatability and reliability. This Refcard covers key container concepts and terminology; common use cases; and guidelines for container registry configuration, operation, security, and storage.
GitOps is an operational framework that leverages DevOps core practices used in application development, including version control, CI/CD, and collaboration, for infrastructure automation. This Refcard introduces the fundamentals of a mature GitOps model, the key benefits of GitOps, and the elements of a GitOps workflow for new feature deployment.
