Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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.

As you monitor the health and performance of your infrastructure and applications, you also need to be able to identify potential threats to the security of those components. To help address this challenge, we’re pleased to announce that Datadog now integrates with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer, a new IAM feature that helps administrators ensure that they have securely configured access to their resources.

So you want to install Elastic Cloud Enterprise (you know, the orchestration solution for the Elastic Stack that simplifies and standardizes how you deploy, upgrade, resize, configure, and monitor one to many clusters from a single UI/API) Installing ECE on one host isn’t tough. Installing it on two isn’t much harder. However, when you start dealing with 3, 5, 7, 11, etc., the complexity grows, as does the work involved in operating and maintaining (upgrading!) it all.

As our application scales and many services are accessing a multitude of data points for each workload needed, it is difficult to ensure each part of the system has the right set of data access permissions. In today’s world, one of the worse nightmares of a software business is data leaking and data privacy issues. Not only it affects the brand reputation, but could also expose the company to heavy fines and other regulatory sanctions.

Cold Starts have been a massive issue with FaaS. In summary, it makes functions slower to startup in some cases. That’s in the opposite way of every effort to improve web applications performance. Many efforts have been made in the recent years to solve AWS Lambda cold starts or educate on handling them. Many have mitigated the issue, but none really solved it. AWS has just made a great progress on the area with the Provisioned Capacity feature announcement.

Once upon a time, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, servers had to be built. A development team requested an environment for their code to run in, and a system administrator or infrastructure engineer plugged in a server and spent hours or days getting it ready to run code. Oh, and by the way, that was only one server of many required to run a web application—and this only happened after budgets were decided and forms were filled out.