Having quick access to metrics and health signals from your AWS environment is paramount to identifying issues expediently and monitoring the effects of any deployed fixes. Datadog is proud to partner with AWS for the launch of CloudWatch Metric Streams, a new feature that allows AWS users to forward metrics from key AWS services to different endpoints, including Datadog, via Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose with low latency.

Elastic Cloud is available for US government users and partners who want to harness the power of enterprise search, observability, and security to make mission-critical decisions. Elastic Cloud is FedRAMP authorized at Moderate Impact level so federal organizations and other customers in highly regulated environments can quickly and easily search their applications, data, and infrastructure for information, analyze data to observe insights, and protect their technology investment.

In January and February of 2021, the threat actor called Hafnium used a number of post-exploitation tools after gaining access to Exchange servers through a zero-day exploit. One of their persistence methods was creating new user accounts in the domain, giving them the ability to log back into the network using normal authentication rather than use a web shell or continue to re-exploit the vulnerability (which has since been patched).

Advertising tycoon David Ogilvy famously remarked, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Replace the word “half” with “one-third” and “advertising” with “public cloud” and you’d describe what enterprises are grappling with right now. They know that not all of the cloud resources they’re paying for are being used, but they don’t know which ones those are.

In my last post (read here), we saw how CloudHedge enables enterprises to execute the transformation of WebSphere ND on Linux Apps to WebSphere Liberty Container in a non-intrusive way. As an addition to the previous post, this one talks about transforming WebSphere ND on AIX to WebSphere Liberty containers using CloudHedge’s App Modernization platform.

“Where necessity speaks, it demands”. This old saying seems particularly apt right now with the pandemic forcing organizations to completely change the way they think about their IT networks. That rapid shift to remote work has resulted in a massive demand for cloud-based services.

GCP audit logs are a powerful tool that track everything happening in your cloud infrastructure. By analyzing them, you can detect and react to threats. Modern cloud applications are not just virtual machines, containers, binaries, and data. When you migrated to the cloud, you accelerated the development of your apps and increased operational efficiency. But you also started using new assets in the cloud that need securing.

Lateral movement is a growing concern with cloud security. That is, once a piece of your cloud infrastructure is compromised, how far can an attacker reach? What often happens in famous attacks to Cloud environments is a vulnerable application that is publicly available can serve as an entry point. From there, attackers can try to move inside the cloud environment, trying to exfiltrate sensitive data or use the account for their own purpose, like crypto mining.

Implementing effective threat detection for AWS requires visibility into all of your cloud services and containers. An application is composed of a number of elements: hosts, virtual machines, containers, clusters, stored information, and input/output data streams. When you add configuration and user management to the mix, it’s clear that there is a lot to secure!

Now that you are starting to build your FinOps team and slowly changing your organizational culture, it’s time to start putting the teams to work - TOGETHER! In this blog I will provide you with some tools and processes to get you started.

We often encounter companies who are end-customers of a Cloud MSP (Managed Service Provider) and/or reseller of AWS products and services. In these cases, the end-customer may not have access to the AWS Management Account because the MSP owns it and restricts access for security reasons.

One of the most common concerns when moving to the cloud is cost. Given that cloud allows you to turn IT costs from CAPEX (long-term investments ex. in hardware equipment and software licenses) into OPEX (day-to-day operating expenses), it’s crucial to choose the right service and estimate it properly. In this article, we’ll look at the common pitfalls and discuss how you can avoid them to truly benefit from the cloud’s elasticity.

Are you looking to get started with InfluxDB on Google Cloud? We’ve pulled together our top resources to help you get the most out of your time series data whether that’s coming from your Google Cloud infrastructure or your own application. Read how customers like Wayfair and Vera C. Rubin Observatory use InfluxDB on Google Cloud to solve their time series data collection and processing challenges to power their multifaceted, complex real-world use cases.

As we develop and deploy cloud compute automation and optimization solutions here at Spot by NetApp, we use various tools to improve our day-to-day operations. In this post I’ll share how we’ve found Terraform Cloud from Hashicorp to be quite helpful with deployment management.

Every service you acquire to use temporarily and let go of when you’re done can use the “as a service” suffix. A cab is a vehicle as a service. Rather than buying a car, you merely pay to have another person’s car move you from one point to the next. IT services embody the same model. Browser-based text editors alleviate the need to install fully-fledged word processors on computers.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that Lambda configuration error is one of the most common error messages, and we all know AWS error messages aren’t known for being especially detailed. Oftentimes you will come across other vague error messages like “encoding not enabled,” or “stream is failing,” and depending on the context, this could mean your services could be completely down.

March 25th, 2021 – Canonical, Collabora and Nextcloud announce the immediate availability of a content collaboration platform for 64bit ARM for both consumers and enterprises. Building on the prior Nextcloud Ubuntu Appliance it adds with Collabora Online, the first viable self-hosted web office solution on the popular Raspberry Pi 4 platform.

When starting a cloud migration project, one of the most important and often challenging parts is to have an accurate understanding of what you are trying to migrate. Over time, companies start new projects, which means creating new infrastructure, adding servers, databases, etc. This is a normal part of the development cycle. However, despite best efforts, inventories get out of sync.

Security remains a consistent priority for cloud providers to ensure that customers are always protected, data is secure and applications are safe. Users of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) are provided with ways to maintain the integrity of the compute instances that applications are running on top of.

In this first edition of our Customer Spotlight series, we are joined by James Kahn and Ben Gittins of Idea 11. Idea 11 is an award-winning, full-stack AWS IT company that specializes in digital transformations, cloud infrastructure, software development and managed services.

It could be argued that consumer broadband networks have historically been poor neighbours of business networks, with CSPs investing more funds in providing better SLAs to their higher paying business customers. But like it did for many of our pre-set ideas, the pandemic turned the tables around for broadband priority. Forced work from home policies, remote learning, and quarantines have effectively turned consumer broadband into business/educational/health broadband services for many.

Organizations are migrating an increasing amount of their infrastructure into the cloud. The cloud provides organizations with a number of benefits like greater scalability, improved reliability and faster time to value. However, these potential benefits can be offset if security is an afterthought.

Running an Artificial Intelligence (AI) infrastructure on premise has major challenges like high capex and requires internal expertise. It can provide a lot of benefits for organisations that want to establish an AI strategy. The solution outlined in this post illustrates the power and the utility of the universal Operator Lifecycle Manager (OLM) using Juju, a universal OLM, to create and manage on premise AI infrastructure.

One of the major concerns when moving to the cloud is how to approach AWS S3 security. Companies may have moved their workflows to Amazon, but are still cautious about moving their data warehouse. And that is totally understandable. We have all heard about data breaches in companies like Facebook, GoDaddy, and Pocket. It’s important that access to information is done properly, in a limited and controlled fashion, to avoid such breaches.

Running and troubleshooting production services requires deep visibility into your applications and infrastructure. Virtual machines running on Google Compute Engine (GCE) provide some system logs and metrics without any configuration required, but capturing application and advanced system data has required the installation of both a metrics agent and a logging agent.

In the 21st century, it’s quite easy to manipulate machines and computers. Our worries are no longer if something is doable, but if something can be perfected. Therefore, we mostly search for new ideas and ways to make our work impeccable. For example, if you’re using a particular software and you realize that the software is excellent, but it could be better in some ways that would allow you to work even faster, you’ll explore the alternatives.

The term cloud native is widely used when thinking about computing and software development, encompassing a wide range of concepts that are regularly used in technology. Let’s break it down and take a closer look – what does cloud native really mean?

One of the most powerful aspects of AWS is their Identity and Access Management (IAM) service. The obvious aspect of its power is that it controls who can do what with all the resources inside your AWS account. But the non-obvious side is how configurable it is. You can encode permissions that are so finely grained that a Lambda Function could, for example, be given just enough permissions to be able to read one attribute from one record for the current user of a DynamoDB Table.

We recently released the Lumigo Dynamic Dashboard to help our customers visualize metrics to monitor their environment the way they want.

COVID-19 certainly accelerated some trends. For example, in my view, COVID-19 accelerated the pace and progress of digital transformation by five to 10 years, as companies faced the need to adapt to a post-COVID-19 world, involving permanently the higher adoption of remote work, remote education, and digital touch-points. Technologies requiring less human touch and more digital touch-points will be adopted faster in the aftermath of COVID-19.

Hybrid IT is here to stay. As companies are moving to the cloud faster than ever, fueled by necessity during the pandemic, enterprise IT organizations must determine how to shift operations accordingly. Managing highly-distributed, multi-cloud IT environments is the new norm.

D2iQ Konvoy simplifies the deployment on Azure by providing a command line interface to automate the deployment and operations of Kubernetes clusters all in one place. In this tutorial, we’ll show you the provisioning of an enterprise-grade Kubernetes cluster on Azure using a single command. Before we get started, let’s talk about a few prerequisites you’ll need: First, download the D2iQ Konvoy installer and authenticate it to your Azure account.

With the volume, velocity, and variety of today’s data, we have all started to acknowledge that there is no one-size-fits-all database for all data needs. Instead, many companies shifted towards choosing the right data store for a specific use case or project. The distribution of data across different data stores brought the challenge of consolidating data for analytics.

As we wrap up the first quarter of 2021, we wanted to talk about things we should be doing as part of a cloud native strategy for the remaining 3/4 of the year. Moving from traditional monolithic. architectures to a modern microservices approach has many benefits, but still has the greater majority of us baffled in terms of tapping into its full potential.

Automation of operational tasks frees the workforce to strategize and innovate in their respective quarters and develop new mechanisms to accelerate an organization’s overall performance. That paved way for low code platforms to become a new reality in the realm of app development. Microsoft’s Powerapps is one such platform whose usage has flared up in recent years as a solution that enables app building with zero knowledge of codes and programming.

When running AKS clusters, ideally you want the compute infrastructure to adapt to your Kubernetes workload and not the other way around. VMs should automatically match your application requirements all the time without labor-intensive, hands-on management, and of course, your Azure bill should be as low-cost as possible. However, in trying to achieve this ideal, AKS and Kubernetes users in general, still face significant operational challenges.

It’s been six years since Kubernetes v1.0 was released in 2015, and since then it’s become a critical technology foundation to deploy modern, cloud native applications with speed, develop them with agility and scale them with flexibility. With a fast-maturing ecosystem, advancements in tooling are making it possible for a new wave of applications to be deployed on Kubernetes.

We are excited to announce the general availability of cross-cluster search and replication on Elastic Cloud. These two features allow you to search and replicate data across clusters in different regions and cloud service providers globally, making it possible to: Be sure to dive in and learn more about the features below! Cross-cluster search lets you search remote clusters across multiple regions and cloud service providers. When you break down regional data silos, you can get insights faster.

Did you know that CloudWisdom’s Bill Analysis tool shows you not just the services currently monitored by CloudWisdom but all services to deliver an overall view of your AWS cost? And if you’ve set up and configured consolidated billing to link multiple AWS accounts, you can include data from all those accounts in that view. You can even add multiple billing orgs to the same CloudWisdom account.

AWS Fargate is a technology that you can use with Amazon ECS to run containers without having to manage servers or clusters of Amazon EC2 instances. With AWS Fargate, you no longer have to provision, configure, or scale clusters of virtual machines to run containers. This removes the need to choose server types, decide when to scale your clusters, or optimize cluster packing. In short, users offload the virtual machines management to AWS while focusing on task management.

Hybrid cloud architectures provide the flexibility to utilize both public and cloud environments in the same infrastructure. This enables scalability and power that is easy and cost-effective to leverage. However, an ecosystem containing components with dependencies layered across multiple clouds has its own unique challenges. Adopting a hybrid monitoring strategy doesn’t mean you need to start from scratch, but it does require a shift in focus and some additional considerations.

One of the advantages that Ubuntu brings to the cloud equation is improving an organization’s ability to run in multiple clouds. Running containers on top of Ubuntu further increases portability. Mist is an open-source multi-cloud management platform that helps teams centrally manage and control their Ubuntu instances across many different cloud environments and/or bare metal. This removes some of the operational and financial barriers to running applications in multiple clouds.

App Modernization is the way forward, especially when you have hundreds of enterprise WebSphere applications nesting on AIX. These applications are age-old, heavy, and expensive to manage and modernize. This causes a huge roadblock especially when your business is growing and your apps need to be scalable, cost-efficient to run and should be highly available. CloudHedge removes the major barrier to AIX WebSphere containerization using the Automated Application Modernization Platform.

To keep up with today’s competitive landscape and with the new normal induced by the pandemic, organizations must modernize their ventures, instigate innovation and be more agile. However, the process of replacing legacy systems isn’t precisely as agile as one thinks it would be. It takes time, and that’s something your company doesn’t have. You need solutions that consolidate years of transformation into mere months.

Azure Storage is like an all you can eat buffet, except the more you eat, the more you pay! This has provided organisations an almost limitless supply of storage, and as we all know, the more that’s available, the more we’ll use. Azure Storage has changed the way many organisations operate both in terms of availability and service.

Today, AWS announced the general availability of Amazon ECS Exec, a powerful feature to allow developers to run commands inside their ECS containers. Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) is a fully managed container orchestration service by Amazon Web Services. ECS allows you to organize and operate container resources on the AWS cloud, and allows you to mix Amazon EC2 and AWS Fargate workloads for high scalability.

As your Elastic usage increases and your use cases expand, it's important to know the benefits and cost savings that you can achieve by running Elasticsearch as a service. But since every Elasticsearch implementation can vary by use case and deployment model, it can be complicated to tackle on your own. So with that in mind, we are excited to share the Elastic Cloud Value Calculator.

When you want to stay ahead and on top of things in a fast-moving industry, machine learning (ML) is surely one of the trending solutions. Today, innovative companies already have leading Machine Learning tools well-integrated into their processes. In comparison, your start could seem dreadfully slow. Or maybe you just don’t have the time or resources to invest in running your own Machine Learning training infrastructure.

Virtana recently published the results of a new State of Hybrid Cloud survey. One of the findings is that 81% of companies in the study who have started their migration to the public cloud have engaged multiple providers. This result tallies with a recent Gartner survey of public cloud users, in which 81% of those respondents said they are working with two or more providers.

I’ve learned a lot about serverless in my first full year at Stackery after joining from the Ops-focused automation company, Puppet. I’ve learned how to deploy rich CMS-backed web applications in a serverless way, how to cast incantations using CloudFormation’s intrinsic functions, but most of all I’ve learned that there’s a lot to learn in order to be successful in AWS.

Mutual of Enumclaw, a 100-year-old insurance company from Washington, modernized their policy processing system in order to reduce TCO and focus on their software and customers - not infrastructure. However, they realized serverless development still presents many DevOps challenges like environments, workflows, documentation and local development.

One of the major considerations when modernizing applications is how and where they’re going to be hosted—what we call landing zones. Today, you have a wide variety of options that includes, at least, some combination of on-prem, public cloud(s), Kubernetes, VMs, PaaS, and bare metal. Because of the dynamic nature of applications and the complexities of enterprise IT budgets, choosing is rarely as simple as just identifying the least expensive option.

Today’s enterprise organizations are using some form of multi-cloud infrastructure, and the numbers don’t lie. According to Flexera’s 2020 State of the Cloud report, an average of 2.2 public clouds are being used per enterprise company. And in a different report from the Everest Group, 58% of enterprise workloads are on hybrid or private cloud. The sheer increase in multi-cloud usage illustrates it’s growing popularity across enterprises.

SQL is great, but sometimes you may need something else. By and large, the prevalent type of data that data engineers deal with on a regular basis is relational. Tables in a data warehouse, transactional data in Online Transactional Processing (OLTP) databases — they can all be queried and accessed using SQL. But does it mean that NoSQL is irrelevant for data engineering?

I believe that the evolution to hybrid cloud is inevitable. Not because it’s grabbing headlines, but because it mirrors the industry’s history of new technology adoption. Take the evolution of virtualization, for example. Going back 20 years give or take, virtual machines popularized by VMware, KVM, and Hyper-V started to gain traction.

To many businesses, the pace of innovation and speed to market has been hindered by the legacy infrastructure. This is mainly due to the closed structures and inflexible old-school architectural formats that they follow. The decades-old infrastructure hesitates to scale up with the growing business demands and realize advanced cloud-based technologies.

Last year, we released native tracing for AWS Lambda through Datadog APM to provide deep visibility into serverless functions and surface performance issues such as cold starts and errors, without any added latency. But Lambda functions are only one piece of the puzzle in a rapidly growing serverless ecosystem, which includes message queues, data streams, notification services, and more.

When you are running cloud-based services as part of your overall business operations, it becomes necessary to monitor your cloud operations for evaluating the usage and efficiency of the cloud services, applications, and infrastructure. Cloud monitoring also lets you watch for threats and be mindful of cyber-attacks. Here is a brief rundown on how best to monitor cloud services and some tips to make it more efficient and useful.

Dive into the article to learn how to monitor cloud server performance with Graphite and get started on your monitoring needs! Application Performance Monitoring (APM) is a crucial part of the technological era. It refers to a methodological approach towards maintaining and sustaining a system’s health. It is extremely important to monitor an application’s health and performance upon launch, and then regularly afterwards.

While cloud is seen as the go-to environment for modernizing IT strategies, many security-conscious businesses are still hesitant to adopt a full cloud strategy. A logical middle ground has now emerged: the hybrid cloud. Hybrid cloud promotes the coupling of on-premises infrastructures with one or more public cloud services to meet both cost optimization and security compliancy. Despite its benefits, hybrid cloud computing can present technical and management challenges.

Each day, more and more companies consider opting for cloud-based solutions, and they almost always end up adopting them to some extent. While the increasing popularity of cloud services may be a significant factor in accelerating the adoption rate of cloud-based solutions, some individuals remain skeptical of migrating their applications to the cloud due to unfamiliar territory.

Cloud API logs are a significant blind spot for many organizations and often factor into large-scale, publicly announced data breaches. They pose several challenges to security teams: For all of these reasons, cloud API logs are resistant to conventional threat detection and hunting techniques.

If you feel intimidated by Kubernetes’ complexity but still need to modernize your business applications with containers, rest assured you’re not the only one. The container orchestration platform solves many problems but also creates new ones, so read on to find out about a new approach that can help you get just the benefits.

Keep track of various tasks and services of containers running within ECS instances.

With the newly added Cloud Services feature, you can define and monitor critical cloud services running in your network.

When using services created by other people, it’s often neither obvious what they mean, let alone how to fix them. One of these error messages you might see when using Amazon API Gateway is “encoding not enabled”. The first question here is, what kind of encoding does this error message refer to? The first thought might go into the video or audio encoding direction and lead to a dead-end since you probably didn’t send any audio or video files.

When I first started building SaaS apps for side projects, it would take me a solid weekend solely to build the Stripe integration. These days, It's possible to build the whole SaaS app in one week.

With the exponential growth of FlashDrive, numbers of images built in the last weeks increased at the same time and we needed to find a better solution than regular docker building to reduce building and deployment time. Uber successfully migrated to Docker in 2017 and build hundreds of images a day for about 3000 micro-services services millions of customers worldwide.

Microsoft Azure provides a suite of cloud computing services that allow organizations across every industry to deploy, manage, and monitor full-scale web applications. As you expand your Azure-based applications, securing the full scope of your cloud resources becomes an increasingly complex task. Azure platform logs record the who, what, when, and where of all user-performed and service account activity within your Azure environment.

More and more, companies from small businesses to global enterprises are migrating or deploying workloads in public cloud environments. Typically, their goal is cost optimization, as public clouds can dramatically reduce on-premises infrastructure costs and corresponding maintenance labor costs. Instead of installing more servers, storage, and networking components in your own datacenter, public cloud environments allow you to deploy dynamic cloud resources, usually with a short to medium lifespan.

Many companies have adopted a multi-cloud environment for their services and many more plan to expand cloud usage in the future. As more VMs and workloads transition to public and private clouds, it is becoming clear that multi-cloud is becoming a standard or benchmark rather than something optional that businesses want to ‘try out’.

Your logs, metrics, security, and trace data are all invaluable to you. They are mission critical for your observability and security needs. As your IT infrastructure grows and keeps generating more and more data, your data volumes and data storage needs go up accordingly. It can quickly become cost-prohibitive to indefinitely store all of it on your hottest machines.

Cloud services make the daily tasks of business easier. They enable remote workforce collaboration, streamline administrative tasks, and reduce capital costs. However, these “pros” come with a few “cons.” The IT stack’s increased complexity means staff work across divergent log management tools when something breaks. Centralized log management for the cloud makes root cause analysis easier by aggregating all event log data in a single location.

We are excited to bring you a number of updates for using Elastic Cloud (Elasticsearch managed service) in the AWS Marketplace.

The best way to reduce your EC2 costs is to integrate MetricFire with CloudWatch. So let us first read what is AWS all about! Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a secure cloud storage and computing services platform that offers a variety of combinations for file storage, database storage, computing options, and content delivery networks.

How do we get started on monitoring AWS Lambda? Let me first introduce you to the term serverless computing. It doesn't matter if you have been in the tech industry only a few months, or you started writing code when Pascal was still considered cutting edge, you probably would have heard the term serverless computing thrown around in recent times. But what exactly is serverless computing?

Troubleshooting an application running on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) often means poking around various tools to find the key bit of information in your logs that leads to the root cause. With Cloud Operations, our integrated management suite, we’re working hard to provide the information that you need right where and when you need it. Today, we’re bringing GKE logs closer to where you are—in the Cloud Console—with a new logs tab in your GKE resource details pages.

11 Tips for Avoiding Cloud Vendor Lock-In Cloud vendor lock-in. In cloud computing, software or computing infrastructure is commonly outsourced to cloud vendors. When the cost and effort of switching to a new vendor is too high, you can become “locked in” to a single cloud vendor. Once a vendor’s software is incorporated into your business, it’s easy to become dependent upon that software and the knowledge needed to operate it.

We're excited to announce that autoscaling is now available on Elastic Cloud. In our initial release, autoscaling monitors the storage utilization of your Elasticsearch data nodes and the available memory capacity for your machine learning jobs.

One of the serverless best practices is one-purpose functions. You should keep your Lambda functions small and solve exactly one use-case. This way, you can optimize them better and keep potential security problems contained. But creating many small functions can get overwhelming quickly. Even small projects can end up with more than 20 Lambda functions.

With our ability to ingest GCP logs and metrics into Splunk and Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring, there’s never been a better time to start driving value out of your GCP data. We’ve already started to explore this with the great blog from Matt here: Getting to Know Google Cloud Audit Logs. Expanding on this, there’s now a pre-built set of dashboards available in a Splunkbase App: GCP Application Template for Splunk!

Microsoft Azure has just announced the details of its new Azure Arc Validation Program, aiming to further increase customer confidence in deploying Arc enabled Kubernetes in production workloads, and at scale.

AWS Fargate provides a way to use AWS container orchestration services—Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)—without needing to provision and maintain the infrastructure that runs your containers. Fargate is similar to serverless container platforms from Google (Cloud Run) and Microsoft (AKS virtual nodes).

In Part 1 of this series, we showed you the key metrics you can monitor to understand the health of your Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS clusters running on AWS Fargate. In this post, we’ll show you how you can: You can use Amazon CloudWatch and related AWS services to gain visibility into your ECS clusters and the Fargate infrastructure that runs them.

In Part 1 of this series, we looked at the important metrics to monitor when you’re running ECS or EKS on AWS Fargate. In Part 2 we showed you how to use Amazon CloudWatch and other tools to collect those metrics plus logs from your application containers. Fargate’s serverless container platform helps users deploy and manage ECS and EKS applications, but the dynamic nature of containers makes them challenging to monitor.

Amazon Web Services is a comprehensive, well-supported cloud service that is continuously growing and evolving. As cloud technology continues to boom, enterprises all across the globe are increasingly depending on cloud service providers to manage their workloads, data, and applications.

Snapshots in Azure is a nice feature that allows you to take a read-only, “point in time” snapshot of a Virtual Machine’s disk. You can take a snapshot of a VM’s OS or data disk. You can use this snapshot to revert the VM to a point in time before an event occurred, or you installed something that didn’t go quite right.

What if I told you that a text file could help you tackle the normally tedious and time-consuming task of setting up and managing your AWS infrastructure? Good news. It’s actually easy to do with an AWS CloudFormation template. A typical AWS infrastructure can consist of numerous resources that might need to be managed across different accounts and regions. Setup is often a manual process that can be overwhelming to maintain.