M&S Consulting is proud to announce that we are now a SUSE (and Rancher) Gold Partner! SUSE has been around for more than 28 years and is the world’s largest independent open source company. SUSE provides a range of solutions, including open source products and enterprise support for a range of Linux distributions, cloud solutions, container orchestration (with Rancher), high-performance computing, SAP, storage, and edge computing. In December of 2020, SUSE completed the acquisition of Rancher Labs, a market leader in Kubernetes management and container orchestration. This acquisition, as well as SUSE’s collaboration with a broad open source community, brings … Read More
Monitoring Your Kubernetes Cluster at a Glance with Lens
Kubernetes is an incredible technology that enables you to do so much more with your resources than ever before. But, how do you know what’s going on inside your cluster? Many folks are already aware of in-cluster solutions like Prometheus and Grafana. These de-facto tools do an excellent job of storing and displaying cluster metrics and performance over time. What if you have more than one cluster to monitor, though? You’d need to log in and view your Grafana dashboards in each cluster or create a combined dashboard showing all your clusters’ current state. Lens is a rapidly growing, free, … Read More
CMMC for DoD Contractors and Suppliers: A Primer
Much like most operating programs/projects/entities within the Department of Defense (DoD) enforce the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) and Risk Management Framework (RMF – NIST Special Publication 800-53), the new Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) is the DoD’s attempt at commonly securing and documenting the cyber controls of it’s Defense Industrial Base (DIB). Following repeated cyberattacks on the DIB, the DoD decided to enforce standards and checks on its contractors and its periphery, much like any program operating on a US Government system. Particularly DIB’s with the following information stored or accessible across that entity’s systems. Beyond that, it … Read More
Overview of AWS CloudShell
At AWS re:Invent 2020, AWS CloudShell was announced as a new service. A browser-based shell that provides access to AWS services from your web browser. This feature has been available in Azure and Google Cloud in some form for some time now; AWS CloudShell now brings the same capability to AWS. AWS CloudShell has unquestionably made many AWS tasks easier. CloudShell inherits your current user’s credentials, so there is no need to authenticate; simply click the AWS CloudShell icon, and you are ready to go. AWS CloudShell itself provides a managed Amazon Linux 2 environment. The service already includes the … Read More
Improving the Process and Technology of License Management
A large government agency was struggling to effectively track the acquisition and renewal of software licensing. Due to employee turnover and the infrequency of licensing review, there was not a consistent record for licenses purchased across the various organizations. The de facto process, unfortunately, consisted of emails and shared spreadsheets spread out among various stakeholders, with no consistency in price verification, expiration dates, or a common approach to vendor management. This process resulted in wasted effort, frequent requests for license extensions, and, in the worst cases, schedule and cost impacts due to production software deactivation when licenses expired. Our team … Read More
Getting Started with GitOps using ArgoCD (How-To)
GitOps is a modern twist on DevOps that prescribes one or more Git repositories as the “source of truth” for the declarative state of your environment(s) and applications. In GitOps, all environment and application configuration is stored as code and actioned upon to change the state of the environment/application accordingly. In this post, we’ll explore how you can get started with this concept and try GitOps out for yourself on a local test cluster. Create a Local Kind Cluster Kind (Kubernetes In Docker) is a local cluster tool under a Special Interest Group (SIG) in the Kubernetes project space. Kind … Read More
End-of-Life Impact of Adobe Flash on Oracle Business Intelligence (OBIEE 11g) and Alternatives
If you have recently installed Adobe Flash Player before December 31, 2020, you may have noticed a popup displayed by the program that informs you that Adobe Flash support is ending on December 31, 2020. As of January 12, 2021, Adobe has put the final nail into the EOL coffin and will block Adobe Flash content from running Adobe Flash Player, and all browsers before 2021 will have a “kill switch” to deactivate Adobe Flash. Adobe strongly recommends users to make the transition out of Adobe Flash in order to help protect their systems as vulnerabilities may be present in … Read More
Selecting the Best Cloud Option for an Oracle E-Business Suite Migration
A nation-wide professional services company was running an on-prem version of Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) Financials and Projects and needed an unbiased evaluation as their hardware aged, support costs began to increase as relative performance decreased. Like many other companies, they began to explore moving to the cloud, but they were unsure how to choose from the wide range of cloud options with licensing and compliance implications to consider. Our team evaluated hosting Oracle EBS on AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). After careful evaluation, OCI provided the best combination of low total cost of ownership, flexibility, and … Read More