Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

A big part of ensuring the availability of your applications is establishing and monitoring service-level metrics—something that our Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team does every day here at Google Cloud. The end goal of our SRE principles is to improve services and in turn the user experience. The concept of SRE starts with the idea that metrics should be closely tied to business objectives. In addition to business-level SLAs, we also use SLOs and SLIs in SRE planning and practice.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently announced the launch of CloudWatch Metric Streams. Cloudwatch Streams can stream metrics from a number of different AWS resources using Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose to target destinations. The new service is different from the current architecture. Instead of polling, metrics are delivered via an Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose stream. This is a highly scalable and far more efficient way to retrieve AWS service metrics.

Today, almost every service now is offered in a “Cloud” variant. But what does that really mean? Are all clouds services equal? It’s easy to see why so many vendors rush to add a Cloud edition/variant of established software they sell. Undoubtedly, there has been a move to Cloud services across the industry, as more and more organizations seek to take advantage of the higher reliability and lower total cost of ownership that Cloud platforms promise.

Designing and running workloads in the cloud is complex. Many services need to fit together in just the right way for optimal performance. The opportunity for error lurks around every corner. This is a high-stakes game with a huge premium on getting things right from the beginning. Even small mistakes can snowball. To help, AWS studied the architectures of thousands of its customers and supplemented that learning with insights from experts.

In order to avoid the repetitive tasks performed over the desktop, Microsoft has developed an extended service, the Power Automate Desktop. It has been recently announced by Microsoft, which has been made available to Windows 10 users. It is a new low-code Robotic process automation that enables business empowerment to automate those tasks that are repetitive and other manual tasks to focus better on higher-value work and to establish more in their corresponding areas of work.

Microservices are the future of software development. This approach serves as a server-side solution to development where services remain connected but work independently from each other. More developers are using microservices to improve performance, precision, and productivity, and analytical tools provide them with valuable insights about performance and service levels.

We are thrilled to announce that Lightrun — the world’s first dev-native continuous observability and debugging platform — has been recognized by Gartner as a Cool Vendor, based on its April 28 report titled, “Cool Vendors in Monitoring, Observability and Cloud Operations” by Padraig Byrne, Pankaj Prasad, Hassan Ennaciri, Venkat Rayapudi, and Gregg Siegfried. “Lightrun helps reduce mean time to repair (MTTR) by enabling continuous debugging capabilities.

Elastic's new frozen data tier decouples compute from storage and leverages low-cost object stores such as Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob Storage, or Amazon S3 to directly power searches. It provides unlimited scaling of storage while preserving the ability to efficiently query the data without any need to rehydrate it first, making it easier and cheaper to manage data at scale.