If you’re hosting on AWS, you can expect some pretty excellent reliability and availability. If your service isn’t responding, it’s likely an issue with your own code. On the other hand, system outages do happen. They’re usually pretty minor. Sometimes they're not.

As companies, big or small, move into the cloud, it’s becoming more and more important to ensure that data is protected. There are numerous options for data resilience, including (but not limited to), Amazon EBS and Amazon S3. What you choose to use depends on your business requirements. Amazon EBS volumes are supposed to be redundant within an availability zone, however they have been known to fail, both due to technical issues, and by human error.

The AWS Elastic Beanstalk Console currently allows you to change between minor platform versions (e.g. from 2017.09 v2.6.1 running PHP 7.0 to 2017.09 v2.6.2 running PHP 7.0), but doesn’t support changes between major versions (e.g. from 2017.09 v2.6.2 running PHP 7.0 to 2017.09 v2.6.2 running PHP 7.1).

Introducing Site24x7's Guidance Report for AWS, your very own personal cloud consultant to help you get the most out of your AWS investment. So, what does this new Guidance Report offer? Well, it helps you follow certain industry best practices related to AWS. How? By checking your AWS account and resources against a list of curated best practice recommendations.

On January 3, 2018, the Meltdown and Spectre CPU architecture flaws were announced to the world. Due to early leaks, the announcement was made roughly a week earlier than planned. These bugs are easily the largest vulnerabilities announced in the last decade and require a complete reassessment of microprocessor architectures, and how software and hardware interact.

Most likely you have heard about Spectre and Meltdown by now. It’s all over the news. As an IT or DevOps engineer, it’s now your job to patch your EC2 instance operating systems. This task can be “fun” if you need to SSH/RDP into every EC2 instance and apply patches. Or, it can be truly fun if you decide to use AWS Systems Manager to apply patches to your OS.

Modern cloud-based data services have revolutionized the way companies manage their data. Tools such as Amazon Athena and Amazon Redshift have changed data warehouse technology, catering for a move towards interactive, real-time, analytical solutions. Both Amazon Athena and Redshift offer their own unique benefits and use cases. Athena provides a cheaper and more portable way to query data while Redshift offers unrivalled performance and scalability.

In many ways, AWS is often seen as a leader in the cloud space. This is for good reason — AWS represents a wide range of business, small and large, as well as a variety of individual users, and as such, where AWS goes in terms of trend is largely where the industry trend itself is going.

AWS Direct Connect provides a dedicated network connection between on-premises and AWS environments. Such a connection can be more reliable and increase the uptime of your services because you’re unlikely to be impacted by an ISP’s availability issues, as is the case with traditional, internet-based connections. With our most recent release, Direct Connect connections can be automatically discovered and monitored in LogicMonitor.