What is Kubernetes? Everything You Need to Know

Containers have become the norm for creating standard applications. Clients and engineers don’t like downtime in the production environment, and recently, several organizations have adopted containers as a solution. The desire for scalable, high-performing applications that don’t experience downtime has led many to orchestration technologies like Kubernetes. Kubernetes is popular yet complex. This article will be a guide to everything you need to know about Kubernetes. In this post from Anita Ihuman on Solarwinds’ blog, you can explore Kubernetes architecture, major components, and regular use instances in real-life scenarios.

Proactive Monitoring: Definition and Best Practices

Constantly monitoring your systems and networks is critical to keeping your applications healthy. You can monitor either proactively or reactively. Although both methods are effective, proactive monitoring is preferable to reactive monitoring, and unfortunately, we seem to spend more time being reactive than proactive. Proactive monitoring is preferable because it can prevent potential issues before they happen and possibly lead to a major downtime. It also helps ensure your end users receive seamless services while minimizing unnecessary revenue loss on your part. In this post on Solawinds’ blog, Ifeanyi Benedict Iheagwara shares some of the best practices for proactive monitoring.

Monitoring JAM Stack (JavaScript, API, and Markup)

Jamstack came out just six years ago but has gained traction rapidly among the community. In fact, Netlify’s 2020 State of the Jamstack Survey states more than two-thirds of respondents have been using it for the last two years. However, with its undeniable popularity, Jamstack also brings complexity, with an application dependent on several tied parts. This makes actively monitoring Jamstack applications crucial. In this tutorial, I’ll walk you through what Jamstack is, how to build a Jamstack app, and the essentials of monitoring your Jamstack application. Find out more from Siddhant Varma on Solarwinds’ blog.

Spring Broken Authentication Guide: Examples and Prevention

Broken authentication vulnerability was recognized as one of the OWASP’s top 10 vulnerabilities. Broken authentication vulnerability essentially is when an attacker gains unsolicited access to restricted data and/or functionality. It can lead to identify theft, data leakage and, in worst-case scenarios, give total control of the compromised system to the attacker. This post will cover broken authentication vulnerability in general and in Java Spring in particular. Check out the full post from Alexander Fridman on Stackhawk’s blog.

Flow Modeling: How Work Moves Through the Enterprise

In order to succeed in today’s competitive, fast-paced market, your team needs to work intelligently and maximize resources. With this purpose in mind, it helps to have a centralized system in place for observing and managing daily workflows and communicating with team members. By doing so, you can help organize and improve operations while increasing output. This post from Justin Reynolds on Plutora’s blog. offers a primer on flow modeling and explores some ways it can help your company improve how it brings products to market. Keep reading to learn more about flow modeling, its benefits, and some of the KPIs you should track to make the most out of flow modeling.

Smoke Testing in Depth: A Detailed Guide With Examples

Smoke testing, or build verification testing, should ideally happen after each new build and before standard software testing. Ideally, it should take place any time you introduce new features to a product. While smoke testing may seem pretty similar to standard testing, there are a few important differences. First, smoke testing only applies to a limited number of test cases. Second, you only use smoke testing with valid data. It’s also easy to confuse smoke testing with sanity testing. But the two tests serve different purposes. While smoke testing is necessary for assessing stability, sanity testing is more about verifying rationality. Either way, both types of tests play an important role in quality control. Learn more about it from Justin Reynolds on Plutora’s blog.

How Do I Scroll to An Element in Selenium? An Easy Guide

Selenium is a tool that developers can use to automate the testing of web apps. With this tool, it’s possible to write test scripts that perform several actions. For example, you can use Selenium to load a webpage, click on links and buttons, or even type text into an input field. Another important action Selenium supports is scrolling a webpage. Usually, the amount of content on web pages exceeds the browser window size. As a result, users need to scroll in one direction or the other to view more content. In this post on Testim’s blog, Pius Aboyi provides an easy practical guide for scrolling in Selenium.

Mocking Static Methods With Mockito: Explained With Examples

We all know that unit tests must not interact with external dependencies—databases, HTTP services, the filesystem, etc. You must resort to mocking those dependencies. This presents a problem: sometimes you have to mock code you didn’t write, presented in the form of static methods. In this post from Carlos Schults on Testim’s blog, you’ll learn how to deal with this challenge in the Java world using the popular Mockito library.

Understanding Data Obfuscation: What Developers Need to Know

We also updated a few posts this week, like this one on data obfuscation. This post will take you through common obfuscation concepts, reasons, and tools. We’ll take a look at the term in a way that leaves you not only refreshingly informed about data obfuscation but capable of carrying it out. Learn more on Testim’s blog.

How to Identify Major Blockers in a CI/CD Pipeline

Here’s another post we updated. However, despite being quite a technical and quantitative endeavor, it’s not always easy to know if blockers exist and where they are. As a result, it’s difficult to know how — and where — improvements are required. So over the course of this article on Cloudbees’ blog, you will learn to identify some of the major blockers you may encounter and suggest a range of ways you can remove them by considering a series of questions.