Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) is an extremely scalable and high-performing container orchestration solution that allows for the effortless execution, termination, and administration of Docker containers within a cluster. As more organizations embrace containerization, optimizing the costs of running containerized applications is essential, especially when using managed services like Amazon ECS.

In this blog, we’ll run through the new features of Cloudify’s VS Code extension and how developers can use it to write better and more consistent blueprints. This will ultimately improve the overall user experience. VS Code is a cross-platform text editor created by Microsoft. Developers can use VS Code as an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for just about any language. Part of VS Code’s appeal is in the ease of developing extensions, which can expand its applications.

In my previous article, I provided an example of using Cloudify’s native REST plugin to send a policy evaluation request to an Open Policy Agent (OPA) service. While dispatching requests to an upstream OPA endpoint is a great way to integrate policy enforcement throughout an environment blueprint, Cloudify has also been working toward native integration of OPA throughout our ecosystem.

You may be thinking of investing in multiple cloud vendors to increase redundancy and deal with the complexity of your enterprise requirements. You are not alone. Many enterprises are moving in this direction to take advantage of the options offered by competing cloud vendors. Adopting one major cloud vendor is a complex project that can consume a company for months if not years.

The old saying goes, “practice what you preach.” When Ivanti started its "Customer Zero" initiative, Bob Grazioli, Chief Information Officer, saw it as a perfect opportunity to test the products and services consumed by customers. For example, during Ivanti’s move to the cloud, Grazioli and the team experienced the same issues that customers would’ve experienced in their migration process. This first-hand experience allowed them to make improvements along the way.

With the surge in digitization, the concept of cloud migration has become a fundamental reality for many organizations. VMware, a widely accepted leader in server virtualization, has enabled many businesses to take advantage of virtual machines’ benefits. However, as businesses evolve, so do their requirements. This often leads to the need for moving these VMware-based virtual machines to more flexible and scalable platforms like Microsoft Azure.

Writing a blueprint might be one of the hardest tasks for new or experienced users, so why would you punish yourself by writing a blueprint the old way? Cloudify’s cfy-lint tool makes writing new blueprints or improving existing ones easier. In this article, I’ll explain some of the errors cfy-lint can identify and how to fix errors automatically.