Container Solutions

For twenty years the advice was simple: don't reinvent the wheel. Wheels were expensive to make and risky to get wrong, so you reached for someone else's. That advice quietly expired. Two things happened at once. Writing code got dramatically cheaper, thanks to LLMs. And using libraries got structurally more expensive, because every dependency is now a recurring obligation: triage, audits, patch windows, and the maintainer who disappears or ships garbage.

Morse genuinely contributed a smart component to the telegraph system, the relay, that made it work long distance. A man called Harold Arnold, picking up where Lee de Forest left off, improved the audion, transforming it into the hard valve or vacuum tube. Without the tube, not plugged in until well after Alexander Graham Bell's patent expired, the telephone could not work long distance and thus could not compete with, let alone replace, the telegraph.

This post is aimed at those interested in continuous compliance, an extension of cloud native principles to the area of software compliance, an under-developed field of software automation. Container Solutions is working on an open source project to help automate the management and reporting of controls, and this post arose from that work. OSCAL? OSCAL stands for "Open Security Controls Assessment Language". It's a standard maintained by NIST.

Imagine a business that knows its survival depends on change—but can't decide how to act. This scenario plays out more often than you'd think, with fear of failure paralysing decision-making and ensuring stagnation. This scenario can be summarised as a paradox: Fear of making the wrong decision leads to inaction. This is a worse decision than simply making the wrong decision.

What is Crossplane? If you don't already know, Crossplane is billed as an: Open source, CNCF project built on the foundation of Kubernetes to orchestrate anything. Encapsulate policies, permissions, and other guardrails behind a custom API line to enable your customers to self-service without needing to become an infrastructure expert.

So when I joined a company whose chosen language wasTCL(no, really), I decided to ask the engineering mailing list what IDEs they used. Surely the senior engineers, with all their wisdom and experience, would tell which of the many IDEs available at the time made them the most productive? This was decades before ‘developer experience’ had a name, but nonetheless it was exactly what I was talking about, and what people fretted about.

SQL is turning 50 years old later this week 🎉 In your opinion, which are the best bits? Which are the worst? pic.twitter.com/aAB5emHuip — Jeremy Taylor (@refset) April 29, 2024 SQL has just turned 50. Only a little bit older than me. Sigh. This post was originally triggered - and I choose that word carefully - by a recent experience on a cloud cost-optimisation project. These experiences prompted me to consider how things had changed since I started working in software.

As someone who has worked in software since 2001, and in the Cloud Native (containerisation and Kubernetes) space since 2013, I'm getting old enough to have seen trends come and go a few times.

In the previous post we outlined and defined the three categories of cost management: Quick Wins Cost Optimisation Finops In this post we'll take a closer look at 'Quick Wins', and outline some of the different categories of savings you might make. We focus here on AWS services, but similar techniques and services exist for all the main cloud service providers (CSPs).

Container Solutions is delighted to announce the open sourcing of a project we have been working on for some time. Compliance Framework is an open source software suite designed to automate and manage your business's compliance tasks. You can think of it like Terraform and CI for software audit and compliance. It allows you to schedule, report, and define audit assessments, and gives you a framework to write your own compliance check 'providers' if they don't already exist.