Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

February 2021

10 Ways to Protect Your Mission-Critical Database

As Werner Vogels says: “Everything fails all the time.” Data is the new oil. We rely on it not only to make decisions but to operate as a business in general. Data loss can lead to significant financial consequences and damaged reputation. In this article, you can find ten actionable methods to protect your most valuable resources.

Introducing, Dashbird's serverless Well-Architected Insights

Dashbird now scans your serverless infrastructure for industry best practices. It’s the antidote for chaos. We’re excited to introduce the Dashbird Well-Architected Insights – a continuous insights scanner combined with Well-Architected reports. The new feature provides serverless developers with insights and recommendations to continually improve their applications and keep them secure, compliant, optimized, and efficient.

Building Complex Well-Architected Serverless Architectures

In this article, we’ll be rewinding back to the very beginning of the AWS Well-Architected Framework to understand how and why it came to be, and why is it of utmost importance, but very often underrated, for serverless developers to learn, understand and apply this framework of best-practices. We’ll also be looking into how the framework has evolved and how it should be used in 2021.

Bullet-Proofing Serverless Infrastructures with Failure and Threat Detection

When building cloud-based systems and serverless systems, in particular, it’s crucial to stay on top of things. Your infrastructure will be miles away from you and not a device you hold in your hands like when you build a frontend. That’s why adding a monitoring solution to your stack, which offers a pre-configured serverless failure detection, should be one of the first decisions.

How I Manage Credentials in Python Using AWS Secrets Manager

A platform-agnostic way of accessing credentials in Python. Even though AWS enables fine-grained access control via IAM roles, sometimes in our scripts we need to use credentials to external resources, not related to AWS, such as API keys, database credentials, or passwords of any kind. There are a myriad of ways of handling such sensitive data. In this article, I’ll show you an incredibly simple and effective way to manage that using AWS and Python.

7 Reasons Why Serverless Encourages Useful Engineering Practices

Serverless provides benefits far beyond the ease of management…it strongly encourages “useful” engineering practices. Here’s how. It’s hard to determine what can be considered a “good” or “bad” engineering practice. We often hear about best practices, but everything really boils down to a specific use case. Therefore, I deliberately chose the word “useful” rather than “good” in the title.

3 ways of recycling third-party code for AWS Lambda

In this article, I’m trying to shine some light on the AWS Lambda Layers, Lambda Extensions, and Docker image for Lambda, in order to add third-party code to Lambda. When and how to use which method, and when to mix and match? Due to the circumstances in 2020, many software releases were postponed, and so the industry slowed its development speed quite a bit. But at least at AWS, some teams got updates out of the door at the end of the year. AWS Lambda got two significant improvements.

Automatically debug and test CI/CD Pipeline with Dashbird

In this article, we will build a CI/CD pipeline with the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) and debug a test it using Dashbird’s observability tool. In 2021, continuous integration and continuous delivery, or short CI/CD, should be part of every modern software development process. It helps deliver new features and bug fixes much faster.