Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As enterprise cloud migrations accelerate, AWS continues to be a clear and compelling choice for digitally-transforming organizations. And while cloud-based operations are faster, innovative, reliable and cost-effective – they pose new, growing challenges for IT Ops, NOC and DevOps teams. With cloud-based operations, IT organizations now need to minimize outages and disruptions across different architectures and workloads.

Seed is a fully managed CI/CD pipeline for Serverless Framework applications. In one of our previous posts we looked at how to build a CI/CD pipeline for Serverless apps on AWS with CircleCI. Today, we’ll look at how to do the same with Travis CI. The purpose of these posts is to dive deep into real-world CI/CD setups, something which most of the tutorials out there skip. We’ll try to illustrate how to set up something similar to Seed but using Travis CI instead.

Every so often you need to schedule a snapshot on a virtual machine, whether that be a VMware virtual machine or a Hyper-V virtual machine, or even multiple virtual machines because someone or something is going to be changed and you need a quick way to roll them back to a running state, just in case things go belly up. It’s a very common task that administrators need to do.

Cloud costs can come with significant sticker shock, especially since many businesses do not have an easy way to track or predict actual cost before the bill arrives. However, there are several architectural changes that businesses can make that will help rein in cloud spend. In some cases, optimal engineering decisions should be made up-front, while in other cases certain areas should be monitored over time to identify opportunities to retool architecture and optimize cloud costs.

Did you know that CloudFormation tags don’t automatically propagate to some resource types? Chief among these are CloudWatch log groups, which means you can’t include them in your cost monitoring (via cost allocation tags) among other things. The only way to tag CloudWatch log groups right now is via API calls. You can do this with the AWS SDK, or using the AWS CLI. This is hugely inconvenient!

School’s out for… Autumn? That’s right, while you were avoiding the back-to-school rush at Office Depot, cutting the crusts off PB&Js, and taking the layers out of mothballs (confession: I have never seen let alone used a single mothball), Serverless Summer School began winding down and is now over for the season. Until next year, school-themed Stackery livestreams!