AI models now read our Ansible roles, Terraform modules and libraries more than we do. What they need is what we always needed: types, units, side effects and examples.

Public TLS certificates drop to 47 days by 2029. Where renewal on VMs breaks, and how to automate it safely for Kafka, Cassandra and web servers.

ingress2gateway converts HTTP Ingress but misses the tcp-services ConfigMap behind Cassandra, Kafka and ClickHouse. Rebuild it with TCPRoute and TLSRoute.

Turning TLS on is the easy part. Eight checks that catch the certificate failures that cause incidents: expiry, SAN drift, CA expiry and failed rotations.

ClickHouse is the fastest practical way to query high-volume event data, and it is not a general-purpose database.

When PID 1 in a container isn't your workload, Kubernetes only sees what the wrapper reports. Where that goes wrong and how to make process death visible.

Racks and data centres decide where every copy of your Cassandra data lives. A practical guide to getting the topology right before the first node starts.

Turn one hardened golden image into a fully configured, environment-specific node on first boot with cloud-init, systemd and vals, with no configuration drift.

Catch TLS certificate expiry before it takes a service down. Build a Prometheus, Blackbox Exporter and Alertmanager stack and alert on expiring certificates.

Europe's shift away from US tech isn't ideology; it's risk management, and businesses face the same vendor dependency problem governments are now acting on.

How Java, librdkafka and MassTransit Kafka clients handle acks, offsets, threading and errors, and what those differences mean for production systems.

A practical guide to hardening your software supply chain using Cosign, Kyverno, Harbor, SHA digests, and SBOMs.

Migrate from DataStax Astra DB to self‑managed Apache Cassandra with zero‑downtime

A practical engineering guide to future-proofing server access by enabling ML-KEM hybrid post-quantum key exchange in OpenSSH 9.9 and 10.0.

How We Mastered AI-Assisted Development: Planning, Agents, and the Power of CLAUDE.md

How Python list assignment, append, extend, copy and deepcopy behave under the hood, so you avoid subtle bugs and write more memory-efficient code.

Build immutable server images with Packer and Ansible instead of patching live boxes over SSH, for more secure, repeatable infrastructure.

In an era where proprietary licensing can threaten operational stability, OpenBao emerges as a vendor-neutral alternative for secrets management.

Moving Kubernetes to bare metal? Choose between bare metal and VMs, then deploy with Rancher, K3s, Kubespray, Kops or kubeadm. Tips for beginners.

Our simpler standard for collecting metrics, traces and logs: why we moved away from the legacy model and what a lean observability setup looks like.

Why log collection is more than a compliance checkbox, and how we collect logs to gain insight into security, performance and reliability.

Kubernetes is no longer just for tech giants. A step-by-step approach to modernising your application with Kubernetes, whatever your company size.

Mount a Google Cloud Storage bucket inside a Kubernetes pod to get scalable, durable storage and save on block storage costs. Step-by-step setup.

Back to basics with SSH: using SSH agent for key management, proxying connections through jump hosts, and security best practices.

How a managed services team switches safely between many customer workloads and environments without running commands against the wrong one.

Following our Kubernetes approach, how we run containers on AWS ECS without load balancers by using Cloudflare to route traffic.

Keep Terraform DRY across multiple environments: how we structure code for clouds, Cloudflare, Kubernetes and more without copy-pasting.

The core stack Digitalis uses to build and run Kubernetes for customers: Terraform, Rancher, Vault, ArgoCD, Traefik, Linkerd, OpenTelemetry and more.

We have previously shown how easy it is to set up Kafka Connect to stream to and from external systems.

Kafka Connect saves you effort by providing a common framework to connect Kafka with external systems using Connectors.

If you work with Postgresql you have most probably heard about PGBouncer. It’s a lightweight external connection pooler which allows…

Plan for losing Rancher: create an emergency service account and kubeconfig so you can still reach the Kubernetes API when Rancher is down.

Want some security tips and context for cloud-native platforms in financial services?

I’ve been using Amazon MSK for some time and today I encountered an interesting problem with autoscaling. Read more to find out!

At Digitalis we have embraced SUSE Rancher and became Gold partners with SUSE Rancher. Do you want to know why? Keep reading.

Terraform is a brilliant tool to manage Infrastructure as Code we at Digitalis both love and hate in equal measure.

We’re going to look at how to manage network policies in Kubernetes with Calico.

An introduction to Kubernetes Network Policies: how to isolate workloads and control pod-to-pod traffic, with practical examples you can apply.

Introducing vals-operator — an opensource tool for managing secrets in Kubernetes

Learn about capacity planning in Kubernetes with Vertical Pod Autoscaler

The built-in ones are good for most use cases. They are pretty granular covering access to Rancher itself down to individual projects or…

This blog shows you how and provides a fully working Ansible project on Github to install Kafka and manage its security.

If you want to understand how to easily ingest data from Kafka topics into Cassandra than this blog can show you how with the DataStax Kafka Connector.

How to manage Ansible projects with version control: approaches to versioning playbooks and roles, and handling dependencies across projects.

How to monitor Docker containers on an AWS ECS cluster with cAdvisor when CloudWatch isn't enough, from deployment to collecting container metrics.

Build a simple incremental backup with rsync and hard links: the options that control what is copied, linked or deleted, with working examples.

A short blog on how to monitor SSL certificate expiry on databases such as Apache Cassandra using Prometheus and visualise on a Grafana dashboard.

Ansible variable scope and precedence can surprise you. A real scenario where a playbook picked an unexpected value, and how to predict which wins.

Create a Kafka topic, change its retention policy with the command-line tools, and confirm messages are retained and deleted as expected.

Concurrent compaction behaved unexpectedly on a Cassandra IoT time series table with a short TTL. What we observed and why it happened.

This blog looks at how to use Molecule to test roles in isolation, as no one is perfect and we all make mistakes but many can be avoid with careful planning.

This blog outlines some good practices that can help you secure your Apache Cassandra clusters.