Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

It’s been a great month for exciting insights about the role that engineering must play in driving profitable innovation.

A few weeks ago we posted the “How we built a serverless Stonks checker API for Wall Street Bets” article. And ever since, we’ve seen quite a lot of volume in the Stonks checker app. In this follow-up article, we will show you some interesting findings around the API. Over the past three weeks, we have seen a good amount of usage of the API we set up. You can see that there was a nice spike soon after the story broke.

In the face of unexpected crises or disruptions, maintaining business continuity has become more important than ever. Last year, businesses around the world had to shift to a remote workforce model overnight. Were their IT departments prepared for this massive shift?

Is my service desk investment paying off? Is my service desk delivering true business value? Are we incurring costs that are not under control? Are we able to leverage the service desk beyond IT use cases? If your current ITSM solution makes you question its true value and reliability, are you even using the right ITSM tool? We don’t think so! Let’s get one thing straight. We don’t advocate a one-size-fits-all approach.

Azure Functions are great for running bits of processing on a trigger without having to worry about hosting. Recently, I needed to debug an Azure Function—I needed to hunt down a particularly evasive bug that wasn’t showing up in the unit and integration tests. As it turns out, debugging an Azure Function isn’t as trivial as simply running the debugger in Visual Studio. Instead, it requires some setup to replicate the environment and configuration typically available in Azure.

The public cloud has greatly increased the flexibility of businesses everywhere. Need another petabyte of storage? You’re but a few mouse clicks or a couple lines of code away from allocating all those disks with effectively no lead time. At the same time, it makes it easy for business units, a functional organization, or a disgruntled vice president with a corporate card—who may be frustrated with your IT for various reasons.

This article was written for the Dashbird blog by Maciej Radzikowski, who builds serverless AWS solutions and shares his knowledge on BetterDev.blog. Kinesis Data Streams are the solution for real-time streaming and analytics at scale. As we learned last November, AWS themselves use it internally to keep, well, AWS working. Kinesis works very well with AWS Lambda.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) introduced a preview of Timestream in November 2018 before releasing the full version in October 2020. AWS Timestream is a time series database that can process trillions of events daily. It is faster and less costly than relational databases offered by AWS for processing time-series information. In this article, we will look at what Timestream can do compared to some other AWS databases, and how to use Timestream to help monitor the health of your system.