Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Cloudtrail logs provide excellent insight into how your AWS account is being used. They record all activity by the web console, SDKs, and APIs. With help from the AWS plugin, getting this information into Graylog is easier than ever. In this blog post you'll set up the required AWS resources, configure the Graylog input, and do some basic searches to explore its capabilities.

A few weeks ago, Amazon announced a new feature for EBS snapshots: Amazon EBS Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR). Normally, accessing data on new EBS volumes was quite slow as the data is lazy-loaded from S3. When Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR) has been enabled on an EBS snapshot, new EBS volumes created from that snapshot will allow fast data access. While this feature is very good, it’s very expensive to keep enabled on an EBS snapshot for a long time.

John F. Kennedy described the journey into space as "...the most hazardous, and dangerous, and greatest adventure of which man has ever embarked." And that can sometimes feel like it applies to cloud asset management, too! While there are many analogies one can draw between space and the cloud, the idea of a vast, seemingly limitless, expanding area where new, ever stranger, things are discovered all the time seems quite apt.

API Gateway is a serverless service by AWS to expose cloud services through private or public HTTPs endpoints. It is used by many serverless teams to connect frontend applications to backend systems in a secure, scalable and seamless way. API Gateway integrates with Lambda, DynamoDB, S3 and a variety of other AWS services. The main issue with API Gateway, so far, was its cost. At $3.50 per million requests, it can be more expensive than Lambda itself.

We did a compilation of all announcements from the AWS re:Invent 2019 that are relevant for Serverless teams, broken down by services.

Up until now, DynamoDB has been the only option of a truly serverless database battle-tested for production environments. Especially after launching the on-demand throughput capacity optimization, is a perfect-fit database engine for serverless projects.

As serverless application architectures have gained popularity, AWS Lambda has become the best-known service for running code on demand without having to manage the underlying compute instances. From an ops perspective, running code in Lambda is fundamentally different than running a traditional application. Most significantly from an observability standpoint, you cannot inspect system-level metrics from your application servers.

Queues are a very common piece of infrastructure. It offers First In, First Out (FIFO) message delivery to one or more competing consumers. As the queue grows the last item added to the queue typically must wait longer to be processed. Just like someone waiting in line to order food, the first one in line gets to order first. Microsoft Azure Service Bus (ASB) is Microsoft’s premier enterprise-level messaging technology that uses this principle of FIFO.

Have you ever have that dream where you’re in a class on Classical Tibetan Algebra? And you haven’t done any homework all semester? AND it’s the final? That was me in this session: I was WAY in over my head with this one. Tod Golding’s material was so high-level that I got a nose bleed. Seriously. My nose started gushing 10 minutes in. This Portland dewdrop is NOT used to the dry desert and casino AC air.