A Higher Education institution recently reached out to us for support regarding their ongoing Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) migration to address a handful of pain points they had been experiencing along the way. The University wanted to leverage the enhanced VDI capabilities offered by AWS AppStream 2.0 to streamline and improve their students’ remote learning experience. Our team worked with the University to optimize the AWS AppStream 2.0 workloads by providing insight into usage patterns for the VDI applications. We also established landing zones using the hub-and-spoke account model to lay a strong foundation for the institute’s future cloud journey. … Read More
M&S is Now a SUSE Gold Partner – Press Release
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
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
Higher Ed Survey: Experience Teaching in Different Formats
In our recent survey on the impact of COVID-19 on higher education, 82% of our respondents had no experience online teaching. How will that impact institutions this fall? Final survey results will be available in late August; keep watching this page and our website for more insights. Our Higher-Ed experts can help in this difficult period, by implementing the proper tools, migrating applications, assisting faculty in moving classes to your LMS, or delivering appropriate training. Contact us today to see how we can help.
Higher Ed Survey: Top Higher Ed Online Teaching Challenges
In collaboration with several university professors, we recently conducted a survey on the impact of COVID-19 on higher education. Unsurprisingly, student engagement was identified as a widespread issue. The top identified higher education online teaching challenges from our survey were: Student Engagement: 35% Adjusting Coursework: 21% Technology: 19% Other: 10% Proctoring Exams Remotely: 8% Simulating Clinical Experiences: 7% Final survey results will be available in late August; keep watching our LinkedIn and Higher Education pages for more insights.
Could IT Managed Services Be Right for Your Organization?
M&S Solution Architect, Shruti Karat, discusses three reasons why IT managed services may be right for your organization. – Video transcript – Hello, Everyone, I wanted to take some time and talk about three reasons why IT managed services might be right for your business. Jumping right into it, reason number one, it allows you to focus on your core competencies. Every organization has core competencies that make you unique. It drives your business and differentiates you from other companies. However, all organizations have functions that are not part of their competitive advantage but is needed to be performed for … Read More
Business Intelligence Hampered by a Lack of Clear Role Management
A top 70 national university uses an enterprise-level solution to report on important university-wide research data and business intelligence. Access to this data is managed by roles across a multitude of schools within the university, but the lack of role management across the university was limiting access and use. To complicate things, the various stakeholders were initially reluctant to adopt a university-wide role framework or standard policy for provisioning and de-provisioning. In short: identity and access management (IAM) were inefficient and disjointed. Our team developed and implemented a phased approach to implement role-based access control (RBAC) framework to upgrade its … Read More