Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As Microsoft Azure continues to be developed and more automation options become available; Azure Automation, Logic Apps, ARM (Azure Resource Manager) and Azure Function Apps to name a few, the question is quickly turning from ‘how do I automate with Azure?’ to ‘what automation type do I use in Azure?’. Across our next few blogs we will seek to delve into the options available and look to define how they stack up against Azure Automation.

Like any other creation in progress or in the making, serverless applications, need to be tested and monitored. How else would you know if what you’ve created is providing desired results? Before putting your “newborn child” out into the world, you must make sure that it’s ready for the world. Software or even hardware of any sort will first be tested before it goes to mass production, and the same goes for your serverless applications.

AWS Lambda has a soft limit of 75GB for deployment packages for all your functions (including the layers you use). This might seem a lot, but a team that has fully embraced serverless can reach this limit very quickly.

This is the second of a three-part series on how OpsRamp helps enterprise IT operations teams manage the challenges of migrating to the cloud. Read part one here. IT teams can build the migration blueprint and test different migration activities in the staging environment using the data collected and processes established during the pre-migration phase. The migration blueprint and related testing help identify gaps, requirements, and barriers to designing a successful migration.

I am a proud lazy programmer. This means that if I can automate a task, I will absolutely do it. Especially if it means I can avoid doing the same thing more than once. Luckily, as an engineer, my laziness is an asset - because this week, it led me to write an HTML scraper for our Changelog, just so I wouldn’t have to manually update the Changelog feed on our new app homepage (btw, have you seen our new app homepage? It’s pretty sweet).

Famed management thinker Peter Drucker is often quoted as saying, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” Tracking and analyzing data of a system provides metrics to measure, predict, and improve the underlining health of the system. Logging data is the simplest act of collecting data for measurement and plays an important role in modern enterprises, as it provides a way to measure the health of hardware devices and software applications alike.

Back in 2008 when we began our journey, cloud computing was still relatively new. Though the term had a lot of buzz around it, organizations only considered the cloud as a place to experiment, not as a viable alternative to run production workloads. Now, the cloud has become the go-to strategy for enterprises and startups alike to deliver their digital business.

As your AWS usage grows, so will your stockpile of EBS snapshots and AMI images. Many of these are used for backups, while others are used to launch EC2 instances from Auto Scaling groups and EC2 launch templates. As your collection of AMI images grows, you will need to start rotating out the old AMI images.