ISSUE 210: Dynatrace Steps up to Help Battle COVID-19 

“Attackers don’t care what threat score a vulnerability has and regularly exploit lower-ranked vulnerabilities if they’re the easiest successful attack vectors.”

The capabilities service meshes offer are straightforward of Kubernetes clusters and microservices. However, service meshes’ underlying mechanics and how they work, and more importantly, how and when they can benefit DevOps, are less apparent.

In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcasts, we spoke with IBM’s Lin Sun, whose official title is a senior technical staff member and “master inventor,” for a comprehensive overview on what service meshes are for those who may not be completely familiar with the topic, for those who may have some familiarity, and for those who want to know more or want to learn about emerging use cases.

Dynatrace Steps up to Help Battle COVID-19

As companies around the world ask their employees to work from home, many company systems are suddenly under tremendous pressure with the new demands – this is doubly true for organizations working on the frontlines of the pandemic right now, including the healthcare, travel and logistics industries.

In response to COVID-19, Dynatrace has extended the free trial of its Software Intelligence Platform. It is the latest of a number of companies to offer software and services for free as part of the response to this global threat — alongside Zoom, Google and Microsoft — to help get through these trying times. With Dynatrace’s services, organizations can ensure applications and infrastructure run smoothly amid increased demand, have access to tools to help them diagnose problems that do occur, as well as enable remote teams to identify and focus on their highest priority work.

The company’s operations themselves will not be impacted by the global pandemic, asserted Dynatrace CEO John Van Siclen. “As a geographically distributed organization, we are accustomed to remote collaboration among our team and with our customers, and well-equipped through redundancy and diversification to maintain the high-quality customer service and support that you expect from us,” he writes.

These are trying times for all the companies in the cloud native space, but Dynatrace shows how important it is not just to survive, but use what we have to help others do so as well. 

Sysdig Offers Full Prometheus Compatibility to Monitor Cloud-Scale Workloads

Cloud native monitoring company Sysdig has expanded its flagship Secure DevOps Platform to incorporate full compatibility with Prometheus, making the platform “the only enterprise monitoring solution to be fully compatible” with the open source cloud native monitoring tool.

Although widely used for monitoring Kubernetes-based cloud native deployments, Prometheus itself can not scale beyond a single server. The Sysdig platform, by contrast, can handle more than 100 million metrics per second and retain 13 months of data — features that it already provides for IBM Cloud Platform. 

With the addition of support for PromQL, the Prometheus query language, the Sysdig platform allows users to create dashboards, alerts, and metric analytics within the Sysdig platform, use Sysdig’s out-of-the-box Kubernetes dashboards and continue using dashboards and alerts they had already created using PromQL.

CTOs Seek Volunteers to Help the U.S. Government’s COVID-19 Efforts

A group of technology leaders from organizations such as Facebook and Kleiner Perkins has launched a volunteer initiative to find IT professionals to set up and run the tech to help the U.S. federal, state and local governments respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The effort, called the U.S. Digital Response, will match data experts, engineers, designers, and healthcare experts with government officials in need of a hand. Thus far, they have already signed on 1,000 volunteers.

What Happens to Your App When an npm Module Retires?

Jeremy Katz, cofounder of Tidelift, writes about the growing problem of abandoned open source packages that end up as dependencies in other applications.  The resulting need to handle the deprecation of modules in npm has long been an adventure for JavaScript developers. The Node.js ecosystem has ballooned with transitive dependencies, and for the most part, they’re an accepted part of the development landscape. But left unmanaged or unmaintained, transitive dependencies can become weak links in your codebase or even serve as backdoors for malicious activity.