The deal — one of its largest acquisitions ever — will give Amazon a physical network of health-care offices and providers, as well as access to technology the start-up has built to enable virtual doctor visits. It adds to the company’s existing health-care portfolio, which includes an online pharmacy and Amazon Care, a virtual and in-home urgent care service.

“There is an immense opportunity to make the health care experience more accessible, affordable and even enjoyable for patients, providers, and payers,” One Medical CEO Amir Dan Rubin said in a statement.

The deal is a sign of Amazon’s long-simmering health care ambitions. As the company has marched from one retail business to another — including books, CDs, electronics, dog food, diapers and clothes — it has had to look in less obvious spots to find opportunities that can provide meaningful expansion.

Enterprises that implement traditional infrastructure management and software development processes are likely to be left behind in today’s competitive market, as the modern software development lifecycle encompasses multiple, simultaneous stages of development and testing.

A unified team that performs development, testing, and operations functions is of the essence.

The benefits of DevOps include:

• Faster innovation, market adoption and business efficiency.
• Rapid delivery of releases.
• Practices like continuous integration, continuous delivery and monitoring and logging ensure the reliability of deliverables.
• Automation and consistency help you develop, operate and manage processes at scale.
• A DevOps cultural model enables effective team building.
• Retain control and preserve compliance by using configuration management techniques, fine-grained controls and automated compliance policies.

What are Monitoring Tools in DevOps?

Given the high velocity of development, testing and operations in today’s application lifecycle, frequent code changes are commonplace.

DevOps monitoring tools provide a comprehensive view of a production environment in real-time, automation, and expanded management throughout the application lifecycle – from planning, development and testing to deployment and operations.

When it comes to application and service monitoring, visualizations, real-time streaming and historical replay are critical components. DevOps monitoring enables development teams to quickly and automatically respond to any ruination in the customer experience.

It enables teams to “shift left” to earlier development stages in order to curtail broken production changes. DevOps monitoring tools help teams manage complex development environments at scale while retaining control of the fast nature that is enabled by DevOps.

In this guide, we will dive into all you should know about the top DevOps monitoring tools.

Best DevOps Monitoring Tools

Here are the best DevOps monitoring tools:

• SolarWinds AppOptics (Librato)
• Sensu Go
• Git (GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket)
• Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
• Microsoft Teams

SolarWinds AppOptics (Librato)

SolarWinds AppOptics is an application and infrastructure monitoring solution that offers a fully customizable metrics platform, distributed transaction tracing, host maps, and more than 150 cloud-ready integrations. With full-stack application performance monitoring (APM), you can visualize and troubleshoot application bottlenecks simply and quickly.

Key Differentiators

• Infrastructure monitoring enables a 360-degree view of your enterprise infrastructure and provides advanced alerting in real time, host and container maps, and custom infrastructure dashboards.
• The solution provides out-of-the-box support for a variety of frameworks and libraries, including Python, Java, Go, .NET, PHP, Scala and Node.js.
• SolarWinds AppOptics automatically determines the root cause of application performance problems.
• With distributed tracing, exception tracking and live code profiling, you can trace requests across processes, hosts and data centers.
• You can introduce any metric into SolarWinds AppOptics and display them along with infrastructure and application metrics.
• With multi-dimensional tags, you can filter and group data with ease.
• With over 150+ turnkey, cloud-ready integrations, you can obtain data straight from the source. These include AWS and Azure services, Docker, Kubernetes, etc.
• You can try SolarWinds AppOptics free of cost for 30 days. The infrastructure and application monitoring package costs $24.99 per host, per month.

Sensu Go

Sensu Go is a turnkey, end-to-end observability pipeline that enables you to collect, filter, and transform monitoring events and send them to a database of choice. The solution delivers monitoring as code on any cloud, helps eliminate data silos, automates service delivery, reduces alert fatigue and enables automation of diagnosis and self-healing, all from a single observability control plane.

Key Differentiators

• Offers limitless integrations for monitoring. You can integrate the platforms and tools that your enterprise relies on, including AWS, Azure, Docker, OpenStack, Kubernetes, etc.
• Using Sensu Go’s high-performance enterprise datastore, you can monitor thousands of nodes from a solitary cluster.
• With Sensu Go’s federation capabilities, you can obtain visibility into globally distributed infrastructure.
• Offers comprehensive health monitoring and enables you to collect basic system metrics, custom application metrics and logs. You can integrate with external databases for unified business intelligence (BI).
• Offers incident management and real-time alerting via communication channels like email, SMS and Slack. You can customize alert policies with contact routing and event filters.
• Provides native support for diagnosis and self-healing — execute custom scripts/trigger service restarts when problems are detected, automate repetitive operations and trigger remediation actions via third-party APIs.
• You can automate service discovery
• Sensu Go is available free of cost and is best suited to small-sized companies. Sensu Go Pro is available for $3 per node, per month and is perfectly suited to mid-sized environments. Sensu Go Enterprise is available for $5 per node, per month and is designed for large-sized enterprises.

Git (GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket)

Git is an open source, distributed version control and source code management (SCM) system that is easy to learn, has a small footprint, and offers lightning-fast performance and efficiency.

With the help of the software, you can easily coordinate work among your DevOps team during source code development. The latest source release of Git is version 2.32.0. You can download the software for Windows, Linux/Unix and macOS.

Key Differentiators

• Popular offerings of Git repositories as a service include GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket.
• Git’s branching model enables frictionless context switching, role-based codelines, feature-based workflow and disposable experimentation.
• Since Git was built to work on the Linux kernel, is written in C and most operations are performed locally, it can effectively handle large repositories in double-quick time.
• As a distributed SCM, there is no single point of failure, as you can create a copy of the entire repository.
• Git provides data assurance, as checksums are used to verify data integrity.
• With staging area, commits can be formatted and reviewed before completion.
• GitHub (free) offers the distributed version control and SCM functionality of Git, along with wikis for every project, continuous integration, task management, feature requests and bug tracking.
• GitLab (free) is a web-based DevOps lifecycle tool. Its applications include continuous integration (CI/CD), SCM, Auto DevOps, DevSecOps, agile development, value stream management and GitOps.
• Bitbucket (now Bitbucket Cloud) is a one-stop destination for project planning and collaboration on code, testing, and deployment. It is available for free (limited users) and in the form of paid plans. Features include pull requests, Bitbucket Pipelines, IP whitelisting, merge checks, code search, issue tracking and Smart Mirroring.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform provides a framework for building and operating information technology (IT) automation at scale. With a visual dashboard, automation tools including certified, reusable content and analytics and role-based access control, you can centralize and control enterprise infrastructure.

The platform’s YAML automation language makes it possible to assess, manage, and share automation content across an organization. With searchable collections of pre-composed modules and roles, you can easily create automation.

Key Differentiators

With standardized and unified IT automation, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform helps make network management more consistent. You can automate user onboarding, infrastructure provisioning and orchestration, system patching and updating and software installation.

Red Hat Insights provides unified visibility across platforms. With Red Hat Insights, you can detect, analyze and remediate potential software and configuration problems through automatic alerts.

Red Hat Insights provides a reporting provision on the status of automation deployments across multiple clusters.

You can easily access and distribute collections of supported, precomposed content for quick implementation.

The platform provides developers and business users access to automation resources and services.

You can automate security practices and collate the tools used in security activities.

Developers can set up automation to manage, provision and deploy compute infrastructure across environments. By automating processes, you can rapidly move software between testing and production environments.

The STANDARD package is ideal for enterprise IT operations. The premium package is ideal for mission-critical DevOps. Contact Red Hat Ansible for pricing information. You can try the platform free of cost for 60 days.

Microsoft Teams

When it comes to unifying distributed members of your DevOps team, there is no better solution than a Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) platform. Microsoft Teams is an UCaaS platform that allows organizations to virtually meet, chat, call, and collaborate.

Microsoft Teams is the free version of Microsoft’s UCaaS offerings and does not include additional Microsoft Office services and applications. That said, the solution is sufficient if all you need is real-time presence monitoring, individual and group chatting and secure online meetings with up to 100 members, for up to an hour at a time.

Key Differentiators

• You can set up ChatOps with messaging extensions. You can integrate all the components in your DevOps toolchain. By integrating DevOps tools, these applications will publish content directly into team conversations/individual chats, which enables faster resolution of issues, ease of collaboration, quicker update sharing, and better knowledge dissemination.
• Enterprises embedded in the Microsoft tool suite can benefit from Microsoft Teams. You can integrate over 700 applications from the app store to increase team productivity and manage complex projects. You can leverage custom-built applications to address industry-specific needs with the Microsoft Power Platform.
• Microsoft Teams is available in 181 markets and 53 languages. Windows, macOS, Android and iOS users can download and implement the solution.
• Microsoft Teams is free of cost. Microsoft 365 Business Standard is ideally suited to small- and mid-sized organizations and is available for $12.50 per month/per user (annual commitment). Microsoft Office 365 E3 is best suited to large-scale enterprises and is available for $20 per month/per user (annual commitment).
• Microsoft 365 Business Standard and Microsoft Office 365 E3 offer additional perks when compared to Microsoft Teams, including larger meeting participant capacities, longer meeting durations, the ability to record meetings, personal file storage, business email, advanced auditing and reporting and secure cloud storage.

Choosing DevOps Monitoring Tools

SolarWinds AppOptics offers modern infrastructure monitoring, root cause determination of application performance issues, distributed transaction tracing, custom metrics and analytics and several turnkey, cloud-ready integrations. Overall, SolarWinds AppOptics is a handy DevOps monitoring tool.

The Sensu Go observability pipeline provides monitoring for mission-critical systems and is integrated, secure and scalable. The solution offers health checks, custom metrics and logs, alerts and incident management, endpoint management, auto-remediation and monitoring as code. Sensu Go is one of the best DevOps monitoring tools around.

Git is an essential component of DevOps. You can incorporate several services for hosting your Git repositories, including GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket. If you are looking for a foundation for building and operating enterprise automation at scale, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is a fantastic tool.

Microsoft Teams is an excellent solution to connect distributed team members. You can avail of ChatOps, integrate over 700 applications to streamline workflow, build custom applications and host and participate in video conferences.

You can utilize one or more DevOps monitoring tools, so strictly assess each of the tools we detailed and add one or more of them to your DevOps toolchain.

The first full stacking of SpaceX’s Starship launch vehicle, doubling as a fit check and photo opportunity, will be followed by more outfitting of the huge rocket ahead of its first orbital test launch. Later Friday, SpaceX detached the Starship upper stage and rolled it back to a nearby high bay for additional work to prep for its trip to space.

Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, tweeted Friday that engineers in South Texas will complete work on the heat shield tiles that cover the stainless steel skin of the rocket’s upper stage, known simply as Starship. SpaceX will also install thermal protection materials around the 29 high-power Raptor engines at the base of the rocket’s first stage, which SpaceX calls the Super Heavy.

Together, the rocket stands 394 feet (120 meters) tall. That’s enough to make the Starship the tallest rocket ever built.

Musk said Friday that SpaceX teams will also complete work on the ground storage tanks that will contain the methane and liquid oxygen propellants to be loaded into the gigantic rocket. Another task will be the mounting of a quick disconnect arm on the launch tower at the orbital launch pad at the Starship development site, which SpaceX calls Starbase.

The quick disconnect arm will feed propellants into the Starship upper stage during the countdown.

“Two weeks,” Musk tweeted.

The launch tower itself is a recent addition to the Starbase site. SpaceX constructed the structure earlier this summer.

Musk did not mention other work planned ahead of the first Starship orbital launch attempt. SpaceX is expected to perform cryogenic proof testing of the Super Heavy and Starship. SpaceX may also be planning multiple test-firings of their Raptor engines.

Last week’s accomplishments at Starbase, located on the Texas Gulf Coast east of Brownsville, included the first assembly of 29 Raptor engines at the bottom of a Super Heavy booster.

SpaceX mounted six Raptor engines to a Starship upper stage, including three engines designed for operation in Earth’s atmosphere and three with larger nozzles optimized for firing in space.

The 29 methane-fueled Raptor engines on the Super Heavy booster will combine to generate nearly 15 million pounds of thrust at full power, more than any other rocket in history.

Musk tweeted Friday that seeing the first full-scale Starship launch vehicle on its launch pad was a “dream come true.”

SpaceX has not identified a target date for the Starship’s first orbital test launch, but the company wrote in a filing with the Federal Communications Commission in May that it expected the demonstration mission to occur some time between June 20 and Dec. 20.

The orbital test launch will follow a series of ongoing atmospheric flights intended to validate the rocket’s performance at relatively low altitudes.

The five Starship prototypes, each using only the vehicle’s upper stage, launched since December have each used three Raptor engines to power the 16-story test rockets to altitudes of more than 30,000 feet (about 10 kilometers) over South Texas. Four test rockets exploded during or soon after landing, but the most recent Starship prototype — Serial No. 15 — nailed its vertical, propulsive touchdown back at the Starbase facility.

The Starship stage, like the Super Heavy booster and SpaceX’s partially reusable Falcon 9 rocket currently in operation, will use variable thrust from its main engines to slow down for landing.

The Super Heavy and Starship vehicles stacked Friday are designated Booster 4 and Ship 20.

Unlike the Starships flown on the recent atmospheric hops, Ship 20 is covered in thousands of heat-resistant tiles to protect the craft’s stainless steel structure from the scorching heat it will encounter during re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere.

SpaceX is developing the privately-owned Starship vehicle as a fully reusable launch and space transportation system capable of ferrying more than 100 metric tons of cargo into low Earth orbit, more than any other rocket in the world. SpaceX eventually aims to develop an in-space refueling capability to extend Starship’s heavy-duty cargo carrying range into the solar system.

During an orbital launch attempt, a reusable Super Heavy first stage booster will detach from the Starship and come back to Earth for a vertical landing. Eventually, SpaceX wants to use catcher arms on the launch tower to capture the descending first stage, making it easier to configure and refuel for another mission.

SpaceX is also modifying offshore oil drilling rigs to serve as floating Starship launch and landing platforms.

The Starship will continue into orbit and deploy its payloads or travel to its deep space destination, and finally return to Earth to be flown again. The Starship vehicle doubles as an upper stage and a refillable transporter to ferry people and cargo through space to destinations in Earth orbit, the moon, Mars, and other distant locations.

The reusable architecture, which builds upon SpaceX’s partially reusable Falcon 9 rocket, is designed to reduce the cost of each flight.

“There is a reason no fully reusable orbital rocket has been built — it’s an insanely hard problem,” Musk tweeted Friday. Moreover, it must be rapidly & completely reusable (like an airplane). This is the only way to make life multiplanetary. Efficiencies of scale is why Starship is so large.”

The Starship’s first orbital test flight, though audacious in scale, will aim to prove out the rocket’s basic launch and re-entry capabilities without fully testing out the complicated landing and recovery systems, according to SpaceX’s filing with the FCC.

After liftoff, the rocket’s Super Heavy booster will fire its cluster of up to 29 Raptor engines for around 2 minute, 49 seconds, on a track toward the east from the Starbase launch site.

About two seconds later, the 228-foot-tall (69.5-meter) Super Heavy booster will jettison to begin a descent to a landing in the Gulf of Mexico around 8 minutes, 15 seconds, after launch. The giant booster will aim to land about 12 miles, (20 kilometers) from shore, according to SpaceX.

Meanwhile, the Starship orbital stage will ignite its Raptor engines at T+plus 2 minutes, 56 seconds, and accelerate into orbit, heading east over the Gulf of Mexico and following a track passing between South Florida and Cuba. Cutoff of the Raptor engines is expected about 8 minutes, 41 seconds, into the mission, SpaceX said, once the rocket achieves the required orbital velocity of around 17,000 mph (more than 27,000 kilometers per hour).

“The Orbital Starship will continue on flying between the Florida Straits. It will achieve orbit until performing a powered, targeted landing approximately 100 kilometers (about 62 miles) off the northwest coast of Kauai in a soft ocean landing,” SpaceX said.

The entire flight — from liftoff in Texas to splashdown near Hawaii — will last around 90 minutes.

One of the first operational uses of the Starship vehicle will be as a lunar landing craft ferrying astronauts to and from the moon’s surface.

In April, NASA awarded SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to design, build, and test a Starship variant to carry astronauts to the moon’s surface for the first human lunar landing in more than 50 years.

NASA says the first crew moon landing in the agency’s Artemis lunar program could still happen before the end of 2024, a date originally established under the Trump administration.

President Biden has kept the Artemis program largely on track, although NASA officials admit technical or budget delays could thwart prospects for a human lunar landing in 2024.

NASA is in the final stages of assembling its own government-managed heavy-lift rocket called the Space Launch System at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The first version of the SLS, known as Block 1, will stand about 322 feet (98 meters) tall and generate 8.8 million pounds of thrust at liftoff.

NASA says the SLS Block 1 configuration can carry more than 95 metric tons of payload to low Earth orbit, but all of the rocket will be expended. The rocket will be powered by four hydrogen-fed engines and twin solid rocket boosters left over from the space shuttle program, during which the engines and booster segments were reused.

The space agency has spent more than $19 billion on the SLS program since 2011, and the rocket’s first launch has been delayed more than three years.

The first SLS test flight, named Artemis 1 and still officially scheduled late this year, will launch NASA’s Orion crew capsule on an unpiloted test flight around the moon, setting the stage for the Artemis 2 mission in 2023 to send astronauts on a round-trip flyby of the moon.

For the first Artemis lunar lander mission, astronauts will also launch aboard an Orion spacecraft on top of the Space Launch System, then rendezvous near the moon with SpaceX’s Starship landing vessel, which will launch separately — and without a crew — atop a Super Heavy booster.

The crew members will dock with the Starship and ride SpaceX’s 15-story lander to the lunar surface. The Starship will ferry the astronauts back to the Orion capsule for return to Earth.

WHY BUSINESSES ARE WILLING TO FACE CLOUD DATA MIGRATION CHALLENGES

Few organizations are concerned about the costs of transitioning to the cloud. But the advantages of migrating data to the cloud are exponential.

Virtually every business is willing to bear the short-term pain of migrating to take advantage of the long-term benefits of cloud computing:

• Mobility
• Cost Savings
• Flexibility
• Disaster recovery
• Scalability
• Insight
• Security
• Autonomous software updates

Though every organization’s business objectives are different, and strategies for moving data to a cloud-based environment also unique, most still face very similar challenges.

In this article, we discuss the top challenges surrounding the cloud migration process, and how you can avoid them.

TOP 8 CLOUD MIGRATION CHALLENGES AND PROBLEMS

– SECURITY & PRIVACY

The moment your data begins transitioning from physical servers to the cloud is when it’s most vulnerable. Take into account network security and potential vulnerabilities before beginning the migration process.

It’s advisable to check:

• What short-term vulnerabilities could the cloud migration process cause?
• Will systems be monitored for threats in real-time?
• Will data be end-to-end encrypted and backed up?
• How do the cloud platform’s security policies align with your own?
• Is it compliant with data security compliance standards (HIPAA, PCI DSS, CCPA, etc.)?

– DOWNTIME

When moving large amounts of data to the cloud, one of the biggest risks is network outages. If your data is not adequately backed up, interruptions can cause irretrievable data loss.

A potential workaround is creating a backup IT environment that can house and run applications until migration is complete. Note that it’s common for temporary servers to be unable to handle peak user loads.

In such situations, it’s best to manage user workloads and/or proactively inform users of limited capacity and occasional application unavailability.

It’s why handling cloud migration during hours of minimum demand is ideal.

– LACK OF STRATEGY

Many organizations make the mistake of failing to define their cloud strategy. Every business’s cloud migration needs vary, but a detailed cloud migration checklist can go a long way to mitigating issues.

Organizations need to focus on creating a change management plan that explicitly defines:

• Comprehensive cloud migration strategy
• Potential cloud migration issues
• Resources to support migration
• Methods to validate successful migration

It’s why many organizations work with experienced IT professionals to develop high-level plans and metrics for a seamless transition.

– INTEROPERABILITY

Not all apps that need to migrate to the cloud may be compatible with the cloud environment. Some applications work better on a private or hybrid cloud as opposed to a public cloud, other applications require minor tweaking, while others may require extensive recoding.

If you are conducting a lift-and-shift cloud migration, make sure to identify and address interoperability issues between on-prem systems and cloud services.

However, with the availability of cloud-based services from a large number of providers, interoperability is less of a concern. If not the major providers (Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, or Amazon Web Services), there are many specialized offerings that may suit your needs better.

– COST

Whereas shifting to cloud-based services will reduce costs in the medium- and long-term, the initial migration process does have costs associated with it.

Consider the costs to your organization:

• Direct Expenses – Contracts, hardware, and software licenses
• Operational Expenses – Maintenance and labor
• Administrative Expenses – Payroll, staff training, and internal system management costs

Make sure the cloud services you opt for don’t have extended vendor lock-in periods, which can limit your freedom to move to cloud services that are more competitively priced.

– ADAPTABILITY

Adaptability in cloud migration refers to an organization’s ability to co-op and become efficient with new systems and policies. 

Organizations unable to adapt often face cloud migration problems. When transitioning to the cloud, prepare business processes to operate hand-in-hand with the new architecture. That may mean taking a new approach to allocate:

• Technical resources
• Funding
• Staffing
• Authority
• Control procedures

– CAPABILITY

In-house IT teams have limited skill sets and resources when it comes to handling the rigors of cloud migration. If you’re in an industry where data security compliance standards are high and your IT staff lack proper certifications, you may be putting your business at risk.

Additional risks of cloud migration include data loss, extra latency, and incompatibility with the current IT infrastructure. To avoid these risks, consider working with an experienced IT partner or follow a cloud migration checklist.

– BANDWIDTH

Cloud-hosted applications should reflect similar or better performance than on-premise environments. However, failure to specify the bandwidth requirements for cloud-hosted applications can result in latency, poor user experiences, and negate the advantages of cloud migration.

Before migrating to the cloud, it’s crucial to map out your network constraints and bandwidth requirements.

The Migration Strategy Board helps organizations develop a data center or cloud migration plan. Designed like an interactive game board, it visualizes the five major phases of a data center and cloud migration project.

It includes objectives, deliverables, tools, and additional tips for migrating assets, infrastructure, and services. A methodology specific to migrations helps ensure operational stability, business continuity, and savings.

White Paper

The Cloud and Data Center Migration Methodology

Discover the cloud and data center migration methodology behind the Migration Strategy Board. It is a proven process that migrates physical assets and apps with zero operational disruption. Get insight for your hybrid IT transformation and reduce IT costs. 

A massive database storing tens of millions of SMS  text messages, most of which were sent by businesses to potential customers, has been found online.

The database is run by TrueDialog, a business SMS provider for businesses and higher education providers, which lets companies, colleges, and universities send bulk text messages to their customers and students. The Austin, Texas-based company says one of the advantages to its service is that recipients can also text back, allowing them to have two-way conversations with brands or businesses.

The database stored years of sent and received text messages from its customers and processed by TrueDialog. But because the database was left unprotected on the internet without a password, none of the data was encrypted and anyone could look inside.

Security researchers Noam Rotem and Ran Locar found the exposed database earlier this month as part of their internet scanning efforts.

TechCrunch examined a portion of the data, which contained detailed logs of messages sent by customers who used TrueDialog’s system, including phone numbers and SMS message contents. The database contained information about university finance applications, marketing messages from businesses with discount codes, and job alerts, among other things.

But the data also contained sensitive text messages, such as two-factor codes and other security messages, which may have allowed anyone viewing the data to gain access to a person’s online accounts. Many of the messages we reviewed contained codes to access online medical services to obtain, and password reset and login codes for sites including Facebook and Google accounts.

The data also contained usernames and passwords of TrueDialog’s customers, which if used could have been used to access and impersonate their accounts.

Because some of the two-way message conversations contained a unique conversation code, it’s possible to read entire chains of conversations. One table alone had tens of millions of messages, many of which were message recipients trying to opt-out of receiving text messages.

TechCrunch contacted TrueDialog about the exposure, which promptly pulled the database offline. Despite reaching out several times, TrueDialog’s chief executive John Wright would not acknowledge the breach nor return several requests for comment. Wright also did not answer any of our questions — including whether the company would inform customers of the security lapse and if he plans to inform regulators, such as state attorneys general, per state data breach notification laws.

The company is just one of many SMS providers that have in recent months left systems — and sensitive text messages — on the internet for anyone to access. Not only that but it’s another example of why SMS text messages may be convenient but is not a secure way to communicate — particularly for sensitive data, like sending two-factor codes.

Read more:

• A leaky database of SMS messages exposed two-factor codes
• Mixcloud data breach exposes over 20 million user records
• StockX was hacked, exposing millions of customers’ data
• DoorDash confirms data breach affected 4.9 million users
• Stop saying, ‘We take your privacy and security seriously’
• Capital One breach also hit other major companies, say researchers
• Macy’s said hackers stole customer credit cards — again

Imagining a dream car for 2035 led DS Automobiles to create an asymmetric, three-seat concept founded on a unique association of two vehicles in one that allows owners to select the driving mode that matches their need at any given moment.

Due to new technology, the vehicle body is capable of recovering its original form after an impact, while the configuration of the front grille and DS X E-TENSE’s cooling capacity adapt to the driver’s impulses. Owing to DS LIGHT VEIL light curtains, the lights brightness is controlled by a function to adjust based the requirements of the occupants, the car and its surroundings.

The Tesla Cybertruck is finally a reality. OK, so not quite, but we know there’s at least one of them in the world. But Elon Musk is promising to deliver this unconventional all-electric full-size truck surprisingly soon, and the company is already taking reservations. Whether you’re actually interested in parking one of these iconoclastic, triangle-shaped pickups in your driveway, or you’re just curious as to how the order process, here’s what you need to know.

Like the order process for the Model Y crossover SUV, which isn’t in production yet, navigating the reservation system is dead simple and only takes a couple of minutes. First, you click over to Tesla’s Cybertruck microsite, where you’ll be presented with three choices:

• Single-motor, rear-wheel drive: $39,900
• Dual-motor, all-wheel drive: $49,900
• Tri-motor, all-wheel drive: $69,900

Tesla hasn’t yet detailed battery sizes, but during the presentation, a max-range figure of over 500 miles was disclosed for the tri-motor model, while the dual-motor version was listed at 300-plus miles and the single-motor base model at a still-healthy 250-plus miles.

For now, the only Cybertruck option listed is Self-Driving, priced at a heady $7,000. As the site notes, “Selecting Full-Self Driving today will secure your price as it increases in the future.” (Despite the option title and Musk’s bold claims for the tech, clicking on the “Learn more” button reveals a lengthy disclaimer that says the tech’s current version requires supervision and does not enable autonomy.)

Still onboard? You’ll have to plunk down your name, email address, phone number, credit card number and agree to pay a $100 deposit. The funds will be taken immediately, but Tesla says the deposit is fully refundable. Note: By placing the order, you’re consenting to allow Tesla to save your credit card. 

By clicking “Place Order,” you also agree to Tesla’s Cybertruck Agreement, Supercharger Fair Use Agreement, and Customer Privacy Agreement, which is all fairly boilerplate stuff that should be familiar to Tesla customers. The salient points in the first document are that your vehicle’s configuration “will be confirmed with you at a later date,” including Tesla providing the “Final Price Sheet” as one’s delivery date looms.

Tesla’s website says you can cancel a Cybertruck preorder at any time right up until delivery, at which point reservation holders are entitled to a full refund of their preorder payments. 

“Until your final configuration is matched to a vehicle, you may make changes to your Vehicle Configuration,” Tesla says. In other words, if you’re curious about the Tesla Cybertruck but you’re not sure how you want to configure yours (or maybe you’re not even sure if you want one, but think you might be interested with more time and research), there doesn’t seem to be much of a downside to plunking down a Benjamin to hedge your bets and get on the waiting list. After all, Tesla says you’re entitled to get your deposit money back right up until delivery.

Speaking of delivery, when can you expect your Tesla Cybertruck? According to the Silicon Valley automaker’s website, “you will be able to complete your configuration as production nears in late 2021.” However, if you want the most expensive — and presumably the most powerful — tri-motor, all-wheel-drive Cybertruck, you’re looking at an estimated production date of late 2022. Take all of this with several grains of salt (perhaps a whole shaker), of course. Elon Musk’s team doesn’t exactly have a sterling record of sticking to announced timeframes, though they do seem to be getting better about doing so.

It is not immediately clear where Tesla plans to build the Cybertruck, which other colors it might be available in (stainless steel is notoriously hard to paint) or which other options will be available. 

Despite showing an electric ATV during the Cybertruck reveal as a special “one more thing” surprise, Tesla hasn’t indicated whether it will produce the recreational vehicle or whether it will offer preorders.

Once you’ve completed your Cybertruck order, you’ll receive a confirmation screen with a tracking number and an adorable little owl. Voila! You’re all set. Now all you have to do is wait…

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