Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Microsoft Azure is a fantastic platform that allows customers to access many cloud resources that customers can then connect to solve business problems. There is enormous power in the platform, and it’s like having your giant box of Lego bricks, which you can build into any solution. The challenge with a platform in which you can build anything you want is that when your application is built, the platform view makes it difficult to create a way for your non-cloud experts to support the end solution.

Developed and released by Google in 2018 with contributions from IBM, VMWare, Red Hat, and other companies, the Knative project is designed to make it as simple as possible to build, deploy, and scale serverless containers across your existing Kubernetes infrastructure. By operating on top of Google Anthos, Knative for Anthos takes this even further by allowing developers to build and deploy applications across any hybrid environments that include both on-prem and cloud-hosted serverless clusters.

Magnite, the biggest independent sell-side advertising solution, empowers publishers with their innovative monetization technology. Trusted by the world’s foremost agencies and brands, Magnite’s advertising technology provides publishers access to brand-safe, high-quality ad inventory, powering billions of advertising transactions every month. In 2021, Magnite’s revenue exceeded $416.5 million.

AWS ELB (Elastic load balancer) automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets and virtual appliances in one or more Availability Zones (AZs). That helps you achieve high availability and fault tolerance. In this article, we will share with you some tips that will help you best utilize AWS load balancer. We will also provide insights on the best use cases of ALB and NLB, which are the two most commonly used load balancers.

"The cloud" started as a term used mainly by tech industry insiders but quickly fell into everyday use over the past several years. As more computing processes moved into off-site data centers and more organizations turned to cloud storage, the masses began to talk about migration to "the cloud." Today, the cloud is the accepted term for this type of computing and is used widely in discussions of IT infrastructure, data storage, and certain types of software.

In 2020, my co-founders and I had this crazy idea of bringing a better Developer Experience on top of AWS. You know, the one that you can easily use with "the promise of the cloud" that any developer can take advantage of and deploy their next successful product in seconds. Somehow, the missing product of AWS 😅. This is where Netlify was an excellent source of inspiration. A nice Developer Experience, where deploying an application is as simple as pushing your code on Git.

When I co-founded CloudZero, I set out to change the way the world thinks about cloud cost optimization and management. For too long, I had watched cloud cost optimization vendors neglect to help companies build better, more cost-effective software. Instead, everything focused on buying better, by optimizing prices and discounts.

While new cloud native architectures are incredibly feature-rich, they can come with a high barrier to entry. Many getting started tutorials are pages long and can take forever to complete. But these always start with the first step of performing an installation. In the spirit of making the installation of Speedscale as simple as possible, we have designed a new interactive installer as part of the speedctl command line interface.

At Taloflow, we depend on AWS, and so do many of our customers. If AWS is down, we've got to know! Unfortunately, the official AWS status site is a bit vague on details, and popular downtime detectors are just not suited for this purpose.

Quality control and observability of your platform are critical for any customer-facing application. Businesses need to understand their user’s experience in every step of the app or webpage. User engagement can often depend on how well your platform functions, and responding quickly to problems can make a big difference in your application’s success. AWS Canaries can help companies simulate and understand the user experience.

By now, most of us know that migrating workloads to the cloud isn’t like simply moving software from one server to another—especially in a complex enterprise infrastructure with many interdependent services and components. There are a lot of things that can go wrong: technical public cloud provisioning issues, security and compliance challenges, lack of cloud skills, wrong public cloud service provider (CSP) selection, unexpected costs, and more.

When you’re troubleshooting an issue, finding the root cause often involves finding specific logs generated by infrastructure and application code. The faster you can find logs, the faster you can confirm or refute your hypothesis about the root cause and resolve the issue! Today, we’re pleased to announce a dramatically simpler way to find logs in Logs Explorer.

In our Green initiative effort, Upsun is exposing all necessary information via an open API about the carbon footprint of our regions, so that you can make informed choices on where to deploy your projects.

While Financial Operations (FinOps) isn’t a new concept, it is becoming more prevalent in companies that have started seeing increases in their cloud spend. Historically, when engineers needed to set up infrastructure to complete a project, they had to go through a long process of procuring servers, finding space in a data center, and getting financial approval. This process could take two months or more, so it allowed plenty of time for oversight by the financial department.

Gone are days of large applications having tens of servers to deal with gigabytes of data, when seconds of response time and hours of offline maintenance were acceptable. Modern applications are deployed on everything running thousands of multi-core processors; end-users expect millisecond response times and 100% uptime. Need not mention the applications work with Data in Petabytes.

Most organizations are moving applications and workloads to the cloud. Our APM survey found that 88% of organizations had some form of cloud technology deployed already. At the same time, there are several misconceptions about the cloud. There are many who believe they don’t need monitoring tools for the cloud because their cloud provider will take care of all of their performance needs. This is a myth because cloud provider SLAs are mainly around infrastructure availability.

When clients make HTTP POST requests to ping URLs, Healthchecks captures and stores request body data. You can use this feature to log a command’s output and have it available for inspection later: Same thing, using runitor instead of curl: You can view the request body data in the web UI: Healthchecks also captures and stores email messages, when pinging by email.

Businesses’ growing desire for more and more public cloud services is showing no signs of slowing down, according to the latest figures from Gartner. The analyst house predicted global public cloud spending will rise 20.4% in 2022 to a total of $494.7 billion, up from $410.9 billion in 2021. In 2023, Gartner predicts end-user spending on public cloud computing will reach nearly $600 billion.

Today marks a significant milestone for SolarWinds, as we’ve formally announced our organizational direction to evolve from our leadership position in monitoring to become a leader in observability. Today is also significant because it marks the official release of our Hybrid Cloud Observability, and I’m excited to share more details on what we believe expands the scope of observability for the market.

If you help to manage cloud environments, you’re probably familiar with the concept of identity lifecycle management. Identity lifecycle management helps you keep track of who is allowed to do what within your cloud. But merely understanding identity lifecycle management isn’t enough to administer modern cloud identities effectively. You also need a way to automate identity lifecycle management at massive scale.

Organisations in the banking, insurance, and financial services sectors have been slower than others in moving to the cloud due to concerns over security, data residency, and privacy. For more traditional financial institutions, there is also the not insignificant consideration that their core banking systems are running on decades old on-prem architecture that is just not possible to shift to the public cloud. Nevertheless, adoption of the cloud in banking and finance is happening.

Ever wonder what techies are saying? Is computer jargon making your brain hurt? Not quite sure what all the buzzwords over the website mean? No worries, you are not alone! Like most subjects, computer science requires a certain vocabulary to build understanding and communicate clearly. It’s not rocket science (obviously, but you do need computer knowledge to do rocket science…), which means you can learn the basics with a little time and effort.

Microsoft announced the release of System Center 2022 on 1st April. The updated Microsoft System Center Orchestrator product information can be found here. The release brings significant improvements to the System Center suite, including an important update to Orchestrator, which is now a 64-bit application. This new functionality enables Orchestrator to work seamlessly with 64-bit PowerShell within code activities, a revision that has been sort-after by the user base.

ZScaler delivers a suite of well-regarded products for helping IT securely move from network infrastructure to the cloud, using principles of zero trust. According to their website, they have 5,600+ customers and process 200B+ daily transactions.

We built Upsun because we knew there had to be a better way for businesses to build, run, and scale a full fleet of websites and web apps at scale. After all, until we brought our solution to market, many businesses had to construct a patchwork of different vendors, technologies, platforms, and solutions to bring their digital experiences to life. But there was no guarantee that all of those different component parts would always “play nicely in the sandbox” together.

Welcome once again to another Logic App Best practices, Tips, and Tricks. In my previous blog posts, I talked about some of the most essential best practices you should have while working with the Azure Logic App: And some tips and tricks: Today I’m going to speak about another critical Best practice, Tips, and Tricks that you need to implement while administrating your cloud integration resources: Control your connectors (API connections).

Migrating your applications from on-prem infrastructure to the cloud comes with a number of benefits, including increased agility, resilience, and scalability, as well as potential cost and IT overhead reductions. But it can be complex, which is why organizations moving to Azure often use Microsoft’s Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure and its strategy for successful migrations.

Businesses both small and large use cloud services to help maintain their data. But managing cloud services — and making sure you stay within your budget — can be a challenge. To maximize your money, you need to focus on one thing: efficiency. If you can be efficient with your time and finances, getting your cloud services up and running will be a breeze.

You’ve secured your cloud identities. You’ve hardened your cloud security posture. You’ve configured strong cloud access controls. But there’s still one more thing you need in order to secure your cloud environment: a cloud workload protection platform, or CWPP. Cloud workload protection platforms secure the workloads that run on your cloud — which are distinct from the infrastructure, user identities and configurations that form the foundation of your cloud environment.

Do you manage critical applications that require your team’s attention and effort, to remain secure, compliant, or simply up to date? Are you worried when you hear about a vulnerability in a framework that you might be using somewhere in your fleet of applications, but maybe not? Stop worrying, we’ve got your fleet covered!

The cloud is growing more and more popular each day. We are in an era where there is a prominent trend of companies migrating from traditional on-premise systems to more reliable and fast cloud-based systems. However, the conversion is still not rampant on a large scale, primarily due to the lack of awareness in the up-and-coming businesses about the cloud’s fundamentals. However, the cloud has proven to be a sound and worthy option time and time again.

By now you’ve probably gotten the message – multi-cloud DevOps (or a hybrid on-prem/cloud approach) is the future of development and deployment architectures. The benefits of this approach are pretty clear: future proofing your business, optimizing for performance and availability, avoiding vendor lock-in, leveraging the best tools/elements of each cloud provider, and more.

Amazon offers two different services, Amazon WorkSpaces and AppStream 2.0, that can be used to deliver apps remotely either streamed via a browser or within a virtual workspace (desktop). Once you understand the differences between the two services the choice is usually clear from the use case. It is in fact common for organizations to use a mixture of both.

Interest is growing in cloud computing’s ability to reduce carbon, but the ‘green cloud’ argument is not as clear as many believe. I’ve argued over the years that cloud computing is a step in the right direction when it comes to sustainable computing. My viewpoint often opposes environmental organizations that argue against the many new power-hungry data centers that cloud companies build.

For many organisations, multi-cloud has become or is becoming inevitable. After all, it’s unlikely there is a single cloud out there that is able to support all your requirements. More than likely however, is the chance that your business is becoming multi-cloud by stealth. Organisations typically use several, to dozens, to hundreds of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products, as well as a handful of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) hosting services, and development Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS).

I always tell people "Observability is not logs, metrics, and traces! Observability is empowering your team to ask questions." That's very aspirational and sounds good, but it's not at all clear. I now have a self-contained story that perfectly explains it!

When a startup is in its very early stages, rapid iteration and dynamism are at the top of its priorities. The ability to do so, while maintaining a stable and high-quality product, is a big challenge facing the R&D group. We want to release features as quickly as possible, but this rapid velocity cane cause conflicts when writing in-depth, comprehensive tests.

Cloud costs are a daily concern for companies running applications on Amazon Web Services (AWS). This makes sense because many organizations struggle with unexpected AWS charges. Although many organizations have a cloud budget in place, accurately controlling costs is difficult. Real-time cost remediation is often difficult for many, leading to inflated AWS costs every billing cycle. No matter where you are on your cloud journey, reducing AWS costs is something you’ll want to do continuously.

Good security may come from strong defenses, but strong security comes from a good offense. This is especially true for network security, where minutes can make the difference between a breach and a near miss. For example, if an unknown IP address triggers an alert for suspicious or abusive behavior, the faster you can isolate and block that address, the less likely it is that the person or entity at the other end can do damage.

Containers are superior to Virtual Machines (VM) in many aspects, including the benefits of being lightweight, easily scalable, highly portable, etc. AWS provides two primary container services i.e., Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). Although both ECS and EKS are growing in popularity but achieving security while using these services is relatively a new topic.

Modern software systems are complex, with services distributed across data centers, in many zones, all around the world. Gone are the days when we managed individual servers dedicated to our organization, comfortable with the knowledge of the unique quirks of our setup. Now we rely on others to manage massive data centers where we borrow small slices of virtual space on shared hardware, traveling over shared networks, all in a system we call the cloud.

Here at Pepperdata, we put a premium on individuals whose skills and experience can help us reach our goals. We believe our team is composed of the best people in their respective fields. Our “Pepperdata Profiles” series gives a spotlight on our gifted individuals and allows us to highlight our employees’ experiences.

When we think of NGOs we usually think of organizations that take action regarding children, diseases, education, or poverty, but most of the time we don't think of privacy. In fact, there are tons of non-governmental organizations working hard to protect everyone's basic right to privacy. Many people are out there right now dedicating their daily lives to safeguarding our freedom and privacy in the digital era. Supporting them is more important than you can imagine.

In 2020, we started an internal project to price our data center systems to understand what they might cost to run in the AWS or Azure cloud environments. We initially used some of the online pricing tools available from these vendors, but they were slow and difficult to use in bulk. You can find the public cloud tools here: AWS and Azure. We were forced to add individual systems one at a time and pick options for each because of the nature of these tools.

Welcome once again to another Logic App Best practices, Tips, and Tricks. In my previous blog posts, I talked about some of the most essential best practices you should have while working with the Azure Logic App: And some tips and tricks: Today I’m going to speak about in my opinion one of the most annoying features/tasks and recommend some Best practices, Tips, and Tricks to minimize it: working with expressions.

This is the second part of our EKS with Terraform series. In Part 1, we talked about Infrastructure as Code and its benefits. We also mentioned the tools we will be using. This time we will actually start using Terraform to create a VPC and EC2 instance.

When your organization uses the cutting edge of technology to function, you may feel like it takes all your time and energy to stay on top of emerging trends. How are you supposed to anticipate what the future will hold when you have to balance those considerations with how to best provide for your customers’ needs today? It’s okay if you don’t have your finger on the pulse 100 percent of the time.

For SaaS companies, the cloud plays a significant role in product creation and delivery. As one of the top drivers of COGS, cloud costs have a major impact on key financial metrics and can dramatically impact revenue and valuation. However, that creates a scenario ripe for conflict: Engineers make important decisions about features and functionality without clear insight into how those decisions will impact spending—and finance continuously gets surprised by seemingly exorbitant cloud bills.

Introducing OpenID Connect identity tokens in CircleCI jobs! This token enables your CircleCI jobs to authenticate with cloud providers that support OpenID Connect like AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Vault. In this blog post, we’ll introduce you to OpenID Connect, explain its usefulness in a CI/CD system, and show how it can be used to authenticate with AWS, letting your CircleCI job securely interact with your AWS account, without any static credentials.

Recently we had an interesting use case from our customer for which Serverless360 mapped a perfect solution. We resolved the issue with the new Log Analytics and Application Insights capabilities from Serverless360. This blog will help you better understand the feature set with a real-time use case.

Don’t let your organization fall victim to data exposure; a well-defined strategy will cover all aspects of the cloud shared responsibility model and keep your data secure. Not long ago, security concerns were the number one reason IT executives hesitated to move workloads to the cloud. Much has changed since then. Security is now considered one of the great strengths of both cloud infrastructure and software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms. But that doesn’t mean total security is assured.

Heroku and AWS are two of the common choices available for cloud hosting. Heroku is a Platform as Service (PaaS) provider that helps startups develop business applications with simplicity and without needing DevOps expertise in the team. Not only does it provide resources automatically, but you can deploy your applications with just a single click. Heroku has been a top choice for developers for years as it speeds up development cycles by providing fully managed infrastructure and application deployment.

Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) is Microsoft’s multi-tenant, cloud-based Identity and Access Management (IAM) service. It takes care of authentication and authorization of user and application identities.

Step Functions, the serverless finite state machine service from AWS. With DynamoDB, Lambda, and API Gateway, it forms the core of serverless AWS services. If you have tasks with multiple steps and you want to ensure they will get executed in the proper order, Step Functions is your service of choice. It offers direct integrations with many AWS services, so you don’t need to use Lambda Functions as glue. This can improve the performance of your state machine and lower its costs.

Over the last two decades, we have seen companies move to the cloud in hordes and presently, the cloud is often the default option for almost all new enterprises. Only companies in a very narrow niche are sticking to on-premise solutions. And the trend is expected to continue. In 2021 alone, the end-user spending in cloud computing was around 482 bn USD.

AWS announced the release of the Lambda Function URLs feature today. In this post, I describe what it is, how it works, and how you can benefit from it. API Gateway and AWS Lambda is a potent combination and lets you build REST APIs without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. API Gateway offers many powerful features out-of-the-box, including: Understandably you pay a premium for these features.

The digital workplace is a phenomenon that has grown in leaps and bounds in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The adoption of technologies has increased and changed all aspects of our lives today, including how we work. However, today’s workplace is very different from the traditional workplace. For one thing, its definition is no longer limited to the physical sense.

Building new applications is a lot of fun, but troubleshooting and fixing the crashes that can come with app development is not. While many organizations are fast adopting the DevOps model, there are still some legacy frameworks where developers and operations teams are separate. Developers build and submit apps to their ops team, who in turn deploy and maintain the production stack. A common issue that arises due to this workflow is the time it takes to find and resolve crashes.

We’re excited to announce that Upsun now offers OpenSearch as a service available and included on all plans. OpenSearch is a distributed RESTful search and analytics engine you can use for log analytics, a search backend, clickstream analytics, and more. With the recent move by ElasticSearch to switch to a licensing model, it was important for us to propose a strong open source alternative. And OpenSearch is completely open source, so you could run and manage it on your own.

It’s impossible to ignore AWS as a major player in the public cloud space. With $13.5billion in revenue in the first quarter of 2021 alone, Amazon’s biggest earner is ubiquitous in the technology world. Its success can be attributed to the wide variety of services available, which are rapidly developed to match industry trends and requirements.

Adopting AWS as your cloud infrastructure seems to be a common choice for most growing companies, but it is not as easy as it looks. Choosing the right services, configuration, and management of these services needs skills and experience. At Qovery, we've heard hundreds of stories about the mistakes made by startups on AWS, and here are the biggest ones. Make sure you take care of these pitfalls when you start your journey on AWS, which will help you successfully migrate and set up on AWS.

Site reliability engineering (SRE) is fast becoming an essential aspect of modern IT operations, particularly in highly scaled, big data environments. As businesses and industries shift to the digital and embrace new IT infrastructures and technologies to remain operational and competitive, the need for a new approach for IT teams to find and manage the balance between launching new systems and features and ensuring these are intuitive, reliable, and friendly for end users has intensified as well.

Industry analysts do primary research and two of the best, IDC and EMA (Enterprise Management Associates), have recently published some great insights for enterprises in 3 areas.

Investors have fallen back in love with profitability. This followed an almost two decade love affair with top-line revenue growth. The growth-at-all-costs paradigm enabled what I call cost-agnostic innovation: If it brings in more customers and revenue, build it — no matter how much it costs. When cash is abundant, investors can afford long-term risk, and cost-agnostic innovation works.

When IT operators and architects begin their journey with Google Cloud, Day 0 observability needs tend to focus on infrastructure and aim to address questions about resource needs, a plan for scaling, and similar considerations. During this phase, developers and DevOps engineers also make a plan for how to get deep observability into the performance of third-party and open-source applications running on their Compute Engine VMs.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers Cost Categories and tagging to help its customers track cloud usage and associated costs. But AWS customers still struggled to connect cloud costs with the products or people who build them despite endless tagging and defining Cost Categories. So, AWS announced Split Charges. This post walks you through what AWS Split Charges are, how they're configured, and how Split Charge rules work.

We are excited to announce that Splunk Cloud Platform is moving to next generation AWS Graviton2 processor hardware to help enable enhanced performance for customers who choose AWS as a provider. This begins a phased transition of our Splunk Cloud Platform indexer tier in a move that will help Splunk operate more efficiently and provide customers with the cutting edge in processing technology.