News for Admins

Hybrid IT Leads to Complexity and Lack of Visibility, Report Says

Nearly half of technology professionals (49%) say the continued adoption of hybrid IT computing is leading to more complexity for IT management, says Sean Michael Kerner, detailing findings from the recent SolarWinds IT Trends Report 2022 (https://it-trends.solarwinds.com/#/).

"The complexity comes in multiple forms," writes Kerner, "including the continued requirement to maintain legacy stacks and the fragmentation between old and new technologies."

Additionally, 49 percent of survey respondents noted that "visibility into their IT operations for infrastructure and applications has been diminished."

This lack of visibility and monitoring capabilities leads to organizational gaps, says Kerner, including the ability to effectively conduct anomaly detection and root-cause analysis and to gather metrics from disparate systems.

Learn more at Data Center Knowledge (https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/cloud/solarwinds-it-trends-report-reveals-hybrid-it-complexity-challenges).

8 Admin Tasks to Automate

Many system administration tasks can be automated to improve your team's productivity, efficiency, and precision, says William Elcock. For example, manual tasks that admins regularly repeat should be automated to save time and reduce human error.

This article describes eight top tasks that sys admins should consider automating, including:

• Patching
• Password resets
• Disk usage scans

Learn more at ServerWatch (https://www.serverwatch.com/guides/system-administrator-tasks-to-automate).

Databricks Fully Open Sources Delta Lake

Databricks has announced (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/databricks-announces-major-contributions-flagship-153000807.html) that it will contribute the entirety of its Delta Lake storage framework to the Linux Foundation and open source all Delta Lake (https://delta.io/) APIs as part of the Delta Lake 2.0 release.

The Delta Lake framework enables building a "Lakehouse architecture" on top of data lakes (https://databricks.com/discover/data-lakes/introduction). It provides ACID transactions for concurrency control, scalable metadata handling, and unifies streaming and batch data processing. The new 2.0 release of Delta Lake (https://github.com/delta-io/delta/releases/tag/v2.0.0rc1) features improved query performance as well as general improvements for writing large scale performance benchmarks.

Databricks also released MLflow 2.0,(https://docs.databricks.com/dev-tools/api/latest/mlflow.html) which includes a new Pipelines feature to accelerate and simplify ML model deployments. The company additionally introduced Spark Connect, which allows Apache Spark to run on any device, and Project Lightspeed, a next-generation Spark streaming engine.