Author: Thomas Janson

Flutter is a free and open source UI framework that was released in 2017 and originally developed by Google. Flutter enables developers to create cross-platform applications using only one codebase. It is a fantastic tool for developers as it can drastically accelerate app development, reduce costs, and make cross-platform app updates easier.

With the increased digitization of everyday life and broader adoption of cloud computing, virtualization has become one of the pillars of today’s Internet. Virtualization technology enables us to create virtual instances or virtual machines of operating systems, networks, and virtualized storage devices, significantly automating and simplifying IT processes, improving scalability, and significantly decreasing costs. Overall, it enables us to reduce the amount of used physical resources/servers by separating various processes onto multiple, customizable virtual machines.

What is Virtualization?

In computing, virtualization is the method of creating a software-based instance of a specific tool that is typically physical. The kinds of tools one can virtualize are:

We can define the Internet of Things (IoT) as a collection of various hardware and software devices and tools connected on one or multiple networks on the Internet. With an ever-increasing number of connected devices on the IoT networks, ensuring optimal IoT security is vital for tools and businesses to remain functional.

Zero Day Vulnerabilities

The zero day vulnerability is a type of hardware or software flaw for which no patch or mitigation is available. The original creators of the product are unaware of a vulnerability, so they will have known about the issue for zero days when one such vulnerability is exploited and brought to their attention.

Introduction

In 2006, several Google engineers started to work on a Linux kernel feature called Cgroups (Control Groups) to limit and isolate hardware resource usage (e.g., RAM, CPU, disk I/O, network, etc.). Eventually, this functionality was merged with the Linux Mainline Kernel in 2008, and that paved the way for all containerization technologies that we use today, like Docker, Cloudfoundry, LXC, etc. 

What is Chef?

Chef is an open-source configuration management DevOps tool used for configuration and management of multiple systems in infrastructure. Using Chef, we can use so-called recipes and cookbooks to automate and speed up managing multiple systems in our environment. By using Chef, we can adjust every system in our environment to our desired state, which we defined using the code in recipes. In the process, code is continuously tested and deployed using Chef.

Ansible is an open-source tool that uses playbooks to enable configuration management, software provisioning, and application deployment. It is primarily written in Python and was released in 2012. Ever since then, it has saved countless hours of often menial work of deploying and maintaining IT infrastructure. Overall, Ansible is very consistent, secure, reliable, and it requires a minimal learning curve. Simply put, Ansible is a powerful tool for automating apps and infrastructure. You can read more about general Ansible information in our recently published article.

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a set of various tools, practices, and ideals that combine software development (Dev) and IT Operations (Ops) into a single unifying force. It allows for better collaboration between developers, operations teams, system administrators, and system engineers. Their streamlined goal is to continually provide a high-value software product to the customer at high speed while monitoring and improving the overall process than using traditional software and infrastructure management.