Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Cloud applications don’t just run flawlessly by way of magic. Many things can go wrong, and rest assured some will go wrong at one point. For small teams, this can be cumbersome and take a toll at the development speed. A monitoring system will detect these issues on behalf of the development team, so that they can act accordingly. At Dashbird, we think there’s much more to it, though, than just detecting and alerting issues, especially for small teams of developers.

A good software design tool enables rapid visualization of application architectures, much like a virtual whiteboard. A great design tool validates service architectures, their communication flows and the infrastructure required to execute them—and builds a scaffold that can be seamlessly taken forward into development. Security is a vital component of that scaffolding, starting at the design stage and extending through the application lifecycle.

In the last post, we compared kiam and kube2iam head-to-head. While kube2iam was declared the winner of that comparison, I feel that the case for kiam too compelling, and the setup too complicated, to not share my experience setting it up in production.

AWS S3 buckets are an indisputably powerful—and extremely well-organized—DevOps tool. Standing for “simple storage service,” the S3 is the lowest tier offered for AWS storage, but it is also the most indispensable. S3 buckets store data for immediate recall, the most active components in Amazon’s arsenal of storage options. They can store a variety of developer applications and up to five terabytes of data each.

No matter how careful developers are or how comprehensive tests are applied before deployment, there will always be some level of issues to deal with in production. When it comes to managing issues and ensuring application quality, two main metrics should be on our radar: time to discover and time to resolve issues.

Today, you probably wouldn’t blink at the idea of involving security in your development process. In fact, “shifting security left” has become so commonplace in the security industry, that there are conferences and job titles dedicated to SecOps (or DevSecOps or SecDevOps *eye roll emoji*). Yet, it wasn’t that long ago that the massive transition to this mindset took place.

In my last post I walked through a brief introduction to Application Insights, and APM tools in general, and hopefully the simple outside-in availability test I concluded the chapter with has been a useful starting point for you on your APM journey. In this post, I’m going to dig deeper into Application Insights and walk you through a use case that should make the purpose of Application Insights really clear.

A unified cloud infrastructure data model is fundamental for enterprises using multiple cloud vendors. Enterprise customers prefer to use multiple cloud vendors as a way to prevent being locked in and dependent on specific platforms. According to Gartner the top vendors for cloud infrastructure as a service in the years 2017-2018, are Amazon 49.4%, Azure 12.7% and Google with 3.3%.