Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

January 2022

Spot Ocean now supports Kubernetes pod topology spread constraints

As a premium autoscaler for containers and Kubernetes applications, Spot Ocean automatically and continuously executes scaling actions based on the requests and specified constraints of pods and specific containers. This container-driver autoscaling approach is core to how Ocean leverages and optimizes the compute infrastructure required to run containers in the cloud.

How to build a SaaS application?

SaaS is a new trend that is transforming how companies manage their software. Today, SaaS is one of the most popular ways to deliver your software. SaaS is cloud-based software deployed from a website and is used to provide software solutions at a cost lower than the price of traditional software licensing, including the ability to build and deploy a solution. It is gaining popularity because of its ease of use and flexibility to be updated frequently.

Application Insights health check with Serverless360

Recently we launched features to provide support for App Insights in Serverless360. App Insights is one of the coolest features on Azure because it can integrate so easily with many different features such as: In Serverless360 our core principle is to democratize the support experience for your application.

5 Cloud Tagging Best Practices Every SaaS Company Should Use

Ask anyone who’s managing any cloud environment of any size, and they will undoubtedly bring up the stress they experience on a regular basis over tags. Since the dawn of cloud, every cloud user has struggled with the challenge of tagging — essentially the only mechanism that exists for you to apply metadata to your cloud environment. The fact that tags themselves are an imperfect tool — both inflexible and hard to manage — makes no difference.

[Infographic] AWS Elastic Load Balancing from a Serverless perspective

Load balancing is a significant part of every internet-facing software, and with Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), AWS offers a set of load balancers for every use case. Since our latest update, Dashbird also gives you insights into these ELB services; let’s look at them and see how they can be used in a serverless environment.

How to Implement FinOps Successfully - Episode 5 / Operate Phase

This is the fifth and final part of this FinOps series, The Operate Phase. If you have missed any of my previous blogs, here is a list of posts in the series: Note: I am ex-AWS, so you will notice a lot more focus on AWS tools and services as examples here, however we are cloud agnostic and all cloud providers have similar services and tools.

Top 10 Monitoring Features for Multi-Tenant Managed Service Providers (MSPs)

eG Innovations works with Managed Service Providers (MSPs) across the world, who use eG Enterprise to deliver value-added services to improve their customers’ resilience and business outcomes. Many of these service providers choose eG Enterprise for its secure and granular role-based multi-tenancy support. The service provider does not have to configure and maintain one instance of eG Enterprise for each customer.

How To Calculate TCO On AWS: A Step-By-Step Guide

Organizations often assume that switching to Amazon Web Services (AWS) will automatically reduce their on-premises spending. Certainly, cloud-based services like AWS' Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) can offer significant cost savings. Yet overspending on AWS is quite common. How can you tell if moving to AWS is the right decision? What figures would you use to quantify and justify that choice to decision-makers? Enter Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) on AWS.

Amazon S3 Cost Optimization Best Practices

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is an essential cornerstone of AWS and among its most popular service offerings. S3 allows tenants to store, secure, and retrieve data from S3 buckets on demand. It is widely used for its high availability, scalability, and performance. It supports six storage classes and several use cases, including website hosting, backups, application data storage, and data lake storage. There are two primary components of Amazon S3: Buckets and Objects.

Elevate AWS threat detection with Stratus Red Team

A core challenge for threat detection engineering is reproducing common attacker behavior. Several open source and commercial projects exist for traditional endpoint and on-premise security, but there is a clear need for a cloud-native tool built with cloud providers and infrastructure in mind. To meet this growing demand, we’re happy to announce Stratus Red Team, an open source project created to emulate common attack techniques directly in your cloud environment.

Be in charge of your cloud costs with these 2021 releases: CloudSpend recap

The widespread adoption of digital transformation triggered by the global health crisis has created a boom. For some businesses, the transition was smooth, but for others, it was an aggressive shift. Out of all the challenges posed by the transition to digital environments, messy cloud cost management and rocketing cloud bills are the most taxing. According to Gartner, through 2024, 60% of infrastructure and operations leaders will bear cloud costs that hurt their on-premises budgets.

Ocean explained: Ocean controller deepdive

As a managed data plane service for containerized applications, Spot Ocean provides a severless experience for running containers in the cloud. Ocean integrates with the control plane of your choice, and handles key areas of infrastructure management, from provisioning compute and autoscaling, to pricing optimization and right-sizing. A core component of Ocean’s architecture is the Ocean controller, which is how Ocean and your Kubernetes cluster integrate and interact.

Cluster Roll feature enhancements now available

Spot by NetApp’s Ocean includes a powerful feature called “cluster roll.” This feature simplifies applying changes to Kubernetes worker nodes. Typical changes include applying a new image, modifying or adding user data, and updating security groups. A cluster roll applies these changes without having to disable the Ocean autoscaler. It also removes the need for you to manually attach new nodes or remove replaced nodes from the cluster.

Is ARM architecture the future of cloud computing?

Central processing units (CPUs) can be compared to the human brain in that their unique architecture allows them to solve mathematical equations in different ways. x86 is the dominant architecture used in cloud computing at the time of this writing; however, it is worth noting that this architecture is not efficient for every scenario, and its proprietary nature is causing an industry shift toward ARM.

Cloud Technology Adoption Trends

In the second half of 2021, eG Innovations partnered with the DevOps Institute to conduct an online survey of more than 900+ individuals from Sys Admin, DevOps, SREs, and other IT backgrounds. We asked questions about: Some of the results included: You can download the full survey results here: Cloud Technology Adoption Trends | eG Innovations If surveys and statistics on technology adoption are of interest, we have some other recent ones available, conducted in the last 12 months,.

D2iQ Joins AWS ISV Accelerate Program

We are excited to announce that D2iQ is now part of Amazon Web Services (AWS) Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Accelerate Program! The AWS ISV Accelerate Program helps ISVs with software solutions that run on or integrate with AWS, drive new business and accelerate sales cycles by connecting the participating ISVs with the AWS Sales organization. The D2iQ Kubernetes Platform (DKP) enables AWS customers to quickly achieve Day 2 operations competency in their cloud-native deployments.

The secret to managing multiple websites

Forrester Research interviewed digital leaders at enterprise organizations and found that, on average, they were maintaining 268 customer-facing websites and applications. As the number of websites you manage continues to grow, so do the number of challenges in managing it. Often the websites are designed by different teams, are built using different languages and frameworks, and run on different hosting solutions with different DevOps tools and workflows.

Puppet's new Cloud Migration Service helps migrate your PE installation

Adopting a public cloud platform like AWS has many benefits, but the process of moving your existing automation capabilities between on-prem and the cloud can present challenges and make it difficult to take full advantage of cloud. In fact, in a recent survey conducted by Puppet, we learned that many Puppet users are significantly influencing their organizations’ cloud migration planning, indicating that Puppet can play a key role in cloud migration.

7 AWS Migration Strategies That Can Help Prevent Overspending

Many companies don’t know where to begin when migrating to AWS. Some worry their data will leak, while others don't know the most efficient migration strategy for AWS. Another group worries about overspending when moving to AWS. The migration strategy involved plays a crucial part in all of these concerns. This guide will discuss more than just AWS cloud migration strategies.

Harnessing the power of the cloud to create personalized experiences

Technology teams are under more pressure than ever before. They’re balancing the demands of a changing workplace, growing customer expectations, and shifting from traditional to digital delivery. While managing more applications with less visibility, they face expectations to deliver fast, customer-grade experiences. These digital experiences are increasingly enabled by the cloud.

PaaS: a better alternative to Kubernetes

Today’s organizations face major challenges in effectively deploying and managing their online services, applications, and websites. In recent years, with interest in infrastructure technologies such as Kubernetes and Docker surging, container orchestration solutions have emerged as a core technology to help overcome challenges and move to a more modern approach.

Datadog Cloud Security Platform

Datadog's Cloud Security Platform—consisting of Cloud SIEM, Posture Management, and Workload Security—delivers real-time threat detection and continuous configuration audits across your applications, hosts, containers, and cloud infrastructure. Datadog derives security insights from your observability data, enabling security and DevOps teams to work together to detect, investigate, and remediate threats.

Using Oracle Cloud as a Data Lake Made Simple With Cribl LogStream

All Cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Oracle Cloud offer Object Storage solutions to economically store large volumes of data and retrieve it on demand. It’s far cheaper to store one petabyte of data in object storage than in block storage. As AWS S3 has become the standard, many on-premise storage appliance vendors have incorporated S3 APIs to store and retrieve data. Oracle wisely continued that trend to OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure).

Introducing CloudZero Budgets: Improve Cost Predictability And Eliminate Surprises

The best budgets aren't roadblocks. They're guardrails: boundaries for quick, collaborative work. Historically, when finance and engineering teams have discussed cloud cost, they’ve run into an obstacle: They don’t speak the same language. At the end of each month, finance gets an ever-changing cloud bill, and engineering explains that, whatever the total, it represents what they need to do their work. Stalemate.

Designing production-ready AWS serverless applications

Serverless has become an increasingly popular paradigm among organizations looking to modernize their applications as it allows them to increase agility while reducing their operational overhead and costs. But the highly distributed nature of serverless architectures requires developers to rethink their approach to application design and development. AWS-based serverless applications hinge on AWS Lambda functions, which are stateless and ephemeral by design.

AWS Re:Invent 2021 - Accelerate Your Cloud Migration for Financial Services

Cloud migration and modernization projects for financial services are very complex initiatives with added challenges of visibility and incident response. He’s how we can help accelerate cloud adoption while reducing customer impact and streamlining and automating incident response.

Getting Ready for a smooth, speedy migration to the Splunk Cloud Platform

This video shows you how a little bit of preparation before you kick off your cloud migration can lead to a speedy, smooth ride. Additionally, this video will help you decide on your migration strategy that is best for your environment and show you how to assess the efforts required for migrating your environment to the Splunk Cloud Platform.

Azure Service Bus Logging with BAM - Walk-through

In a previous article, we talked about how you could use BAM to do advanced management of dead lettered messages on the Azure Service Bus using a scenario like below. This article will show how you can set up this kind of example. Let’s assume your Order Processing functions are already in place, and your starting point is that sometimes you will get dead-lettered messages, and we need to implement the Send message to the BAM logic app and configure Serverless360.

Dashbird now integrates with 5 new AWS services

TL;DR: Dashbird launches observability for five new AWS services (ELB, SNS, RDS, OpenSearch, and HTTP API Gateway) to allow for a faster, more secure, and smoother serverless observability experience. Dashbird, the leading monitoring platform for serverless AWS applications, announces five new AWS integrations.

19 Questions To Ask Your Cloud Cost Management Vendor

Not all cloud cost management tools are equal. Whether you’re in the process of evaluating cloud cost management vendors or already have a tool in place, here are 19 questions you should ask to ensure you have all the capabilities needed to maximize performance and minimize cost of your hybrid cloud deployment across the following.

Improving Environmental Sustainability Through Cloud Migration

With rising awareness and increasing calls for action, the pressure is on to improve your organization’s energy sustainability. While frequently overlooked, moving your IT workloads to the cloud is one of the quickest ways to achieve a material reduction in your carbon footprint. Organizations typically look to the cloud to improve agility, scalability, and reduce costs.

Continuous Software Pipelines: Why Enterprises Are Going Cloud-Native 2021 Dev Week Cloud Keynote

Why are enterprise organizations making a move from on-premise solutions to completely cloud-native? What does that mean for improving, scaling, and securing their CI/CD pipelines? And what exactly is continuous packaging, anyway? Join Dan McKinney in this Dev Week Cloud session he answers all of these questions, helping attendees understand the true difference between cloud-hosted and cloud-native, how to get started with migrating to a cloud-native solution, and the true benefits of being entirely within the cloud.

Cloud-Native Pipelines: Secure Software Delivery, Made Simple Dev Week Cloud Workshop Session

Your entire tech stack is likely in the Cloud - so why aren’t your software packages? Whether you’re currently on-premise, have your own in-house solution or have a bit of a hybrid set up, join us in this session to explore why the future is cloud-native, what the benefits of this are over cloud-hosted, and how to easily set up a secure, cloud-native software pipeline in 60 seconds.

5 Ways the World of IT Operations Will Shift in 2022 (and Beyond)

The following first appeared on VentureBeat. Despite the economic uncertainty due to the global pandemic, worldwide technology spending in 2021 increased by nearly 9% to $4.2 trillion. The U.S. economy grew sharply across the past three quarters of 2021, leading to stronger consumer spending, higher price inflation, and persistent employee shortages amid the great resignation.

Improve Apache Spark performance with the S3 magic committer

Most Apache Spark users overlook the choice of an S3 committer (a protocol used by Spark when writing output results to S3), because it is quite complex and documentation about it is scarce. This choice has a major impact on performance whenever you write data to S3. On average, a large portion of Spark jobs are spent writing to S3, so choosing the right S3 committer is important for AWS Spark users.

Ocean Insights now available for Google Cloud

As companies move more applications into the cloud, and package them into containers, environments become more complex with limited visibility. While infrastructure is abstracted away as much of it is delivered by the hyperscalers, this creates an opaqueness that makes it hard to control costs and understand resource utilization. As a result, many companies are experiencing high cloud bills and lots of cloud waste.

LogStream for InfoSec: VPC Flow Logs - Reduce or Enrich? Why Not Both?

In the last few years, many organizations I worked with have significantly increased their cloud footprint. I’ve also seen a large percentage of newly launched companies go with cloud services almost exclusively, limiting their on-premises infrastructure to what cannot be done in the cloud — things like WiFi access points in offices or point of sale (POS) hardware for physical stores.

How to save on your Azure Monitor and Log Analytics Costs

Thomas Stringer has a couple of great blog posts on how to understand your Azure monitoring costs and also on how to reduce your costs, see Azure Monitor Log Analytics too Expensive? Part 2 – Save Some Money | Thomas Stringer (trstringer.com). In the past I’ve blogged on How to calculate the Azure Monitor and Log Analytics costs associated with AVD (not an easy task!).

The 10 Best AWS Migration Tools (Updated 2022)

Moving large amounts of data to the cloud can be arduous and time-consuming. A cloud migration would take years if engineers manually moved data from assessment through mobilization and migration phases. An effective cloud migration also requires adequate data encryption, fast data transfer speeds, and constant monitoring. Migrating workloads to AWS requires you to monitor costs in real-time as well to avoid overspending.

Monitoring AWS Spot instances using Sumo Logic

Spot worker nodes on EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) are a great way to save costs by allowing customers to take advantage of unused capacity. With Sumo Logic, we have experimented with and adopted spot worker nodes for some of our EKS clusters to see if we can pass along the same benefits. We decided to share some of the learnings, challenges, and caveats with using spot instances along with the monitoring setup.

Planning a Pain-Free Cloud Migration. Interview with David Colebatch, CEO / Chief Migration Hacker

Ever wonder how best to plan for a successful cloud migration? I sat down with David Colebatch, CEO / Chief Migration Hacker at Tidal Migrations to better understand what it takes to approach a cloud migration with confidence. David will help to demystify cloud migration planning and further change our perceptions of the cloud.

How to become HIPAA compliant on AWS in 2022?

Since the 90s, when you run a company in the Healthcare industry in the US market, you must comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Security Rule. Some of the security rules are directly linked to how you operate your organization, the others how you manage your application data for your customers. This article will walk you through what to consider on AWS to be HIPAA compliant in 2022.

Webhook, Pub/Sub, and Slack Alerting notification channels launched

When an alert fires from your applications, your team needs to know as soon as possible to mitigate any user-facing issues. Customers with complex operating environments rely on incident management or related services to organize and coordinate their responses to issues. They need the flexibility to route alert notifications to platforms or services in the formats that they can accept.

Creating custom notifications with Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Run

The uniqueness of each organization in the enterprise IT space creates interesting challenges in how they need to handle alerts. With many commercial tools in the IT Service Management (ITSM) market, and lots of custom internal tools, we equip teams with tools that are both flexible and powerful. This post is for Google Cloud customers who want to deliver Cloud Monitoring alert notifications to third-party services that don’t have supported notification channels.

Why Heroku and AWS have failed to serve modern developers?

Heroku Vs. AWS remains a long and persistent debate among developers. Both platforms have strengths and weaknesses. Over the last 10 years, Heroku and AWS played a huge role in the cloud hosting and software development industry, by significantly unlocking productivity in a way that it has never been reached before. They are the platforms behind most of the successes from the last decade. However, we are in 2022 and it still looks like if we (developers) were in 2010 to deploy our apps in the cloud.

Introducing Cycle's Support of Google Cloud Platform

Our goal has always been to automate and standardize the management of infrastructure and deployment of applications across user infrastructure. Today, we are excited to announce that we've launched support for Google Cloud (GCP), expanding our natively supported providers list and further expanding the choice, flexibility, and reach the platform offers to current and new users. With this new integration, users can deploy, manage, and scale their containerized workloads to GCP compute infrastructure.

How to create an Azure storage account

So you finally are ready to try out some of Azure’s most common and loved technologies.Well the cheap storage they provide is definitely one of them that we do. Whether you want to store your own personal files and photos, or you have a requirement from your business to quickly expand some storage, with Azure its quick and easy to setup, access and use. In this quick tutorial I will run you through just how easy it is to setup an Azure Storage Account.

Patterns for better insights and troubleshooting with hybrid cloud logs

Hybrid and multi-cloud environments produce a boundless array of logs including application and server logs, logs related to cloud services, APIs, orchestrators, gateways and just about anything else running in the environment. Due to this high volume, logging systems may become slow and unmanageable when you urgently need them to troubleshoot an issue, and even harder to use them to get insights.

Efficient Container Monitoring with Pepperdata

Container monitoring strategies and purpose-built container monitoring tools just may be the next hot topics swirling around the Kubernetes discussion forums this year. Over 77% of IT professionals expected to migrate 50% or more of their workloads to containers with Kubernetes by the end of last year. With the rise of container usage growing, having the ability to monitor the performance of your containerized workloads is critical.

Why COGS Isn't The Most Relevant Cost Metric For SaaS Companies

For most SaaS companies, COGS (which stands for cost of goods sold) is used to calculate gross margin and profit. COGS is an accepted term with a specific definition under U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) — and is widely used as part of calculations to gauge the health and valuation of a company. Like many accounting practices, COGS stems from the industrial era, when most businesses were concerned with the creation of physical goods.

Eight best practices for a successful cloud migration strategy

As a result of the pandemic, we are all navigating an unpredictable mix of virtual, hybrid, and in-person conditions in our business and personal lives. This situation isn’t going away any time soon. The pandemic has prompted businesses across all industries to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives, where the cloud is critical. On-demand self-service environments provide a reason for cloud migration as cloud architectures help businesses reinvent and address uncertainties.

The growing demand for multi-cloud monitoring and Site24x7's featured releases: 2021

Catalyzed by the pandemic, 2020 and 2021 witnessed an exponential growth in digital transformation and cloud computing. According to Forbes, this growth is expected to continue in 2022. Site24x7 added more integrations and features to its cloud monitoring portfolio to keep up with the business trends and enterprise demands. Let's dive deep into Site24x7's multi-cloud monitoring releases in 2021 and shed some light on what you can expect from us in 2022.

8 Signs You Have a Cloud Optimization Problem

In a survey we conducted last year, we discovered that many enterprises overestimate their ability to optimize their hybrid cloud infrastructures. More than three-quarters of respondents gave themselves high marks for a range of capabilities. Here’s the exact breakdown of the number who rated their abilities a 4 or 5 out of 5: This sounds like great news, except there’s a problem. When we asked about how easy it is to get a global view of cloud costs, 42% said that it takes some effort.

Deploy Friday: E84 How WeWeb rapidly incorporated user feedback into their product

WeWeb.io is a web application builder that enables the development and deployment of interactive sites, without the need to write code. You can import existing front-end components, connect or create databases, and deploy on hyperscale infrastructure all from their web interface. The company got started as a YCombinator graduate, and have quickly developed the product, proven their market, and begun to scale.

6 Actionable Ways To Improve Your Cloud Efficiency

With incredibly complex cloud architecture — that may even includes Kubernetes and multi-tenant infrastructure — organizations are finding it hard to measure and monitor the performance and cost of their cloud environments. To stay competitive, organizations should aim to be as efficient as possible — which can help companies to lower costs, increase margins, and improve cloud efficiency.

Ocean explained: container-driven autoscaling with Kubernetes

Whether you’re using a managed Kubernetes service like AWS EKS, GCP GKE or Azure AKS, or self-managing a DIY cluster deployed with open source tools like kops and Kubespray, the underlying hardware can vary from container to container. Each container requires specific resources (CPU/ memory/GPU/network/disk) and as long as the underlying infrastructure can provide those resources, the container will be able to execute its business logic.

Accelerate incident analysis by incorporating Ocean logs in any pipeline

Spot Ocean delivers container-driven autoscaling to continuously monitor and optimize your cloud environment. Positioned at a busy crossroads in the application deployment pipeline, Ocean has a critical role when shipping new containers. Given the highly dynamic nature of Kubernetes environments, events happen constantly and take shape as logs in Ocean. These can help you understand the chain of events in different scaling scenarios, from debugging cluster issues to incident analysis.

Learning from the AWS Outage: Internal Monitoring Alone Isn't Enough

If you have set up your own monitoring services with Amazon CloudWatch, Azure Monitor or another internal tool, we suggest you consider looking beyond the horizon. These services often provide internal web monitoring only. Perhaps they validate HTTP availability from locations outside their networks, but HTTP checks won’t give you a 360º view into the state of your services.

How to Monitor Any SaaS Application Without Scripting Requirements

Exoprise lets IT administrators easily monitor any SaaS application (internal or external) without scripting. Collect performance data metrics (login time, upload and download time, network path performance, connect time, proxy connect time, DNS lookup time, TTFB, etc.) using our Web Login sensor. The sensor auto detects credential forms, supplies login credentials, and is able to record the server uptime and availability statistics in real-time. All this without the need for any complex scripting. It's simple to deploy the sensor. Start web application monitoring right away and improve the end-user digital experience.

Big Data Cloud Performance Management: How to Do it Right

Big data cloud performance management is key to success in the cloud. Paired with cloud computing, big data can transform an enterprise—especially when managed correctly. It requires no CapEx, enables quicker data processing and analysis, and allows for rapid scalability. But not having a plan to properly manage your big data performance in the cloud can be the difference between realizing the ROI the cloud promises and having to move back to the data center in defeat.

Transforming Education and Government IT and Cloud Environments

State, local government, and educational institutions have unique IT requirements and regulations that traditional commercial organizations don’t face. From specific IT budgeting processes to strict compliance, public sector organizations are constantly forced to maximize every IT resource in their complex IT environments.

How to deploy the Google Cloud Ops Agent with Ansible

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and Operations teams responsible for operating virtual machines (VMs) are always looking for ways to provide a more reliable, more scalable environment for their development partners. Part of providing that stable experience is having telemetry data (metrics, logs and traces) from systems and applications so you can monitor and troubleshoot effectively. Many Google Cloud services, including Google Compute Engine, provide basic system metrics out of the box.

AWS re:Invent 2021: Scale the Kubernetes-first, cloud-native model

The widespread adoption of Kubernetes has made it table stakes for the modern cloud native stack. Software is now being purpose-built for Kubernetes, and as companies enter this new phase of their cloud journey, they are looking to scale. Building upon years of experience with Kubernetes, Spot by NetApp is continuously innovating to bring new ways to achieve this goal. From container-optimized, serverless infrastructure to Kubernetes-native continuous delivery, Spot is connecting the dots to vastly improve the efficiency and manageability of Kubernetes applications and environments.

9 Cloud FinOps Challenges - And The Solutions To Overcome Them

Companies migrate to the cloud to become more productive, respond to market changes, and be flexible — while spending less on cloud infrastructure. But there is one thing that many cloud-based organizations have learned: Cloud costs add up. Fast. As a result, 71% of cloud financial management teams doubt they will achieve expected results at the expected time or at all. Only 29% of cloud FinOps teams expect to achieve their cloud goals.

Refined User Experience, New Executive Visibility, and Enhanced Cloud Monitoring with Splunk Enterprise Security 7.0

Just like that, another year has gone by full of remote work, virtual conferences, and lengthy Zoom calls. And, although we were not able to see our fellow Splunkers in person at.conf21 that didn’t stop us from previewing the latest enhancements to Splunk Enterprise Security. And now, it gives us great pleasure to announce that Enterprise Security 7.0 is available!

Discover Database Servers In 3 Steps

I recently had a cloud migration client who was at the beginning stage of their discovery phase and looking to jump straight to “which database platforms should I be using in the cloud?” - a tall ask you might say, but following the three steps below they were able to discover and analyze all of their database servers in just two weeks.

Control Plane Demo

Control Plane is a perfect substrate to run microservices. When you deploy on Control Plane, your containerized apps run concurrently on AWS, Azure and GCP. Customers experience ultra-low latency, 99.999% availability and you can mix-n-match ALL the services of AWS, Azure and GCP as if those clouds have virtually merged. All your "Ops" portion of "DevOps" has been codified so developers are freed to focus on the Dev part and leave the Ops part to the platform.

What is Cloud Backup and How Does It Help Small Business?

Cloud technology has enjoyed exponential growth over the past several years. Increases in broadband and wireless speeds have spurred a rise in everything from cloud storage to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Before the cloud grew into its current form, it was primarily a tool for backing up data in a safe, remote location. Throughout the evolution of cloud, backup and restore remains one of this technology’s most widely-used and important functions.

What is an AWS Lambda Function?

In this article, we will cover the basics of a Lambda function and its functionality in our every day digital lives. AWS Lambda, as we already know, is a compute service that allows you to run code without managing servers. AWS Lambda runs the code when it is needed, and it is automatically scaled. The code you execute on AWS Lambda is called Lambda function, and it can be considered, for better understanding, as a formula in a spreadsheet.

Key metrics for monitoring Azure SQL databases

Microsoft Azure SQL Database is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) database offering for modern cloud applications. It’s a fully managed service that runs on the latest version of the SQL Server database engine, enabling you to create highly available and performant database instances without needing to maintain hardware upgrades, patches, or backups.

Tools for collecting Azure SQL Database data

In Part 1 of this series, we discussed key metrics for monitoring Microsoft Azure SQL databases. We also looked at how your database resource and audit logs complement metrics to provide more insight into database performance, activity, and security. In this post, we’ll show you how to collect metrics and logs from your database instances and monitor them with Azure’s monitoring and reporting tools.

Monitor Azure SQL databases with Datadog

In Part 2 of this series, we showed you how to monitor Azure SQL Database metrics and logs using the Azure platform. In this post, we will look at how you can use Datadog to monitor your Azure SQL databases alongside other technologies in your infrastructure. Datadog provides turn-key integrations for Azure along with more than 500 other technologies, enabling you to track long-term performance trends across all systems in your infrastructure, not just your SQL databases.

5 top hybrid cloud security challenges

Hybrid cloud environments can add complexity, reduce visibility, and require different logging and monitoring approaches for security teams. For a growing number of organizations, IT environments encompass a blend of public cloud services, private clouds, and on-premises infrastructure—with the latter becoming an ever-smaller portion of the mix. The past two years have seen a major uptick in the use of cloud services, and the trend shows no signs of slowing.

Feature Spotlight - Business Applications

Serverless360 is a Cloud management platform engineered for Microsoft Azure. Everything you need to empower your Azure Support teams with more meaningful features and deliver effortless support. Visualize your Business Applications, spot any issues, fix them, Take advantage of Serverless360 to improve the overall operational efficiency of your Azure Team!

Feature Spotlight - Business Activity Monitoring

Serverless360 is a Cloud management platform engineered for Microsoft Azure. Everything you need to empower your Azure Support teams with more meaningful features and deliver effortless support. Achieve end-to-end tracking on business process flow across Azure resources and hybrid integrations. Get visibility on the integration solution that the functional support teams need. Improve support efficiency with a unified view of business transactions.

Feature Spotlight - Azure Documenter

Serverless360 is a Cloud management platform engineered for Microsoft Azure. Everything you need to empower your Azure Support teams with more meaningful features and deliver effortless support. With the Azure Documenter feature, Microsoft Azure Subscription is made readable to derive deeper insights. Autogenerate documents in minutes and share with only targeted individuals without putting security at risk.

Why Serverless? The Next Wave Of Cloud Cost Optimization

Traditionally, applications are developed and deployed on local servers managed by developers. This keeps the whole process under the control of one development team that is responsible for keeping the system running smoothly. With serverless computing, however, the server management and code execution within applications takes place remotely, under the control of the cloud service provider rather than an in-house development team.

5 Misconceptions About Cloud Cost Optimization Tools

Unless you are one of the 1% of enterprises that have zero workloads running in the publice cloud, you need a cloud cost optimization tool. Yes, you do. And if you have workloads running in multiple public clouds—which somewhere in the neighborhood of 85% of enterprises do—you really need a cloud cost optimization tool. If I’m preaching to the choir, feel free to skip to the end of this article where you’ll find a link to try Virtana Optimize for free.

Top Cloud Security Trends 2022

Enterprise cloud use cases are changing and expanding, and companies are now realizing new security challenges that need to be resolved. Cloud security solutions can include everything from new security tools to more advanced training to investing in new team strategies. See below to learn about the tops trends cloud security experts are seeing in the market.

How To Calculate Customer Retention Cost: The Hidden SaaS Metric

You may have heard that keeping an existing customer is five times cheaper than acquiring a new one. But that isn't always true. “Hidden costs” often accompany customer retention, loyalty, and increasing "share of customer". Could you be spending more on retaining customers than on winning new ones? This quick guide will walk you through the meaning of Customer Retention Cost (CRC), why it's important to calculate, and how to calculate CRC.

Azure vs. AWS vs. GCP: A Direct Comparison

Ever since the pandemic hit the world in 2020, many businesses and institutions have begun to adopt cloud computing into their operations. With more employees working from home, companies have moved from on-site data centers and chosen cloud computing services. Although cloud computing is not new, its relevance has increased during the last year and has revolutionized how businesses and institutions are operating now.

Pepperdata CEO Ash Munshi on the Future of Big Data APM in 2022

Recent data shows that the global APM (application performance management) market is booming. Currently valued at $6.3 billion, the global APM industry is expected to reach $12 billion by 2026. This growth indicates the increasing importance of monitoring, diagnosing, and improving application performance. Visibility and automation is key to sustaining the growth and evolution of APM.

How the new k6 Cloud app plugin makes it easy to correlate QA data and system metrics in Grafana

One of the common challenges when doing performance testing is the difficulty of correlating the metrics of your application with your testing results. Having available QA, infrastructure, and application metrics together allows engineering teams to better understand the behavior of their systems during the testing, helping to detect and prevent potential issues in their applications.

JFrog Artifactory on Your Choice of Cloud Provider

JFrog Artifactory is a scalable, universal, binary repository manager that automatically manages your artifacts and dependencies throughout the application development and delivery process. Artifactory supports Kubernetes, the de facto orchestration tool in the industry, for automating deployment, scaling, and management of microservices and containerized applications..

Cloud Budgeting: A Guide To Accurately Forecasting Cloud Spend

Are your cloud costs out of control? Do you struggle with cost overruns or going over your cloud budget? Forecasting costs accurately can help you create a realistic cloud budget you can stick to and prevent cloud bill surprises. In this guide, we’ll cover why it’s so challenging to predict cloud costs and techniques you can use to create an accurate budget your organization will be able to maintain. Table Of Contents.

Application composability - a cloud computing perspective

Let’s remember the time in the 2000s when companies introduced their cloud computing offerings at a large scale. New services were put into the popular IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS categories. New kinds of storage and messaging technologies were promoted. Also, novel approaches were discussed, such as designing applications for horizontal scalability and eventual consistency.

Easy Lambda Function Monitoring with the AWS Lambda InfluxDB Template

AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that allows you to run code without having to manage servers. Lambda provides autoscaling and bills only on compute time, so you aren’t paying for unused resources. Some common use cases are file processing, stream processing, and acting as a backend for web and mobile applications. AWS Lambda functions can be invoked with external HTTP requests as well as by events triggered by over 200 different AWS services.

Application Modernization Using Microsoft Azure - Top 4 Reasons Why You Can't Ignore It

In the digital transformation era, any organization on its growth to glory must consider developing and investing in modernizing their application portfolios. That includes healthy competition, legacy modernization, and creating a unique identity from the rest of others. Moreover, advancements in technology have forced organizations to reconstruct themselves to the new normal. Application modernization is all about the process of repurposing or consolidating current business applications.

Dark Data: The Cloud's Unknown Security And Privacy Risk

Over the last few years, multicloud frameworks have drifted into the mainstream. Organizations now create, store and manage enormous volumes of data across different cloud platforms. Despite the magnitude of this trend, there’s a stark and often disturbing truth: Businesses often have little or no visibility into much of the data that resides in these clouds. The culprit? Dark data.

Cloud Nimble: The Next Evolution

Over the last several years, systems architects have had to make sure their systems are cloud native, with applications that are optimized for scalable cloud technology infrastructure. In today’s environment, you should be asking whether your solutions are cloud nimble as well. For the modern enterprise, cloud computing is now the default model for applications, storage, and compute.

Squadcast + Amazon EventBridge: Routing Alerts Made Easy

Amazon EventBridge is an AWS serverless event bus service making it easier to build event-driven applications. It uses events generated from your applications, integrated Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, and other AWS services. It delivers a stream of real-time data from event sources to target services like AWS Lambda. You can also set up routing rules to determine the destination where you wish to send the data and build decoupled application architectures.

Enhanced security for the Spot-Jenkins plugin

Many of Spot by NetApp customers run Jenkins as a core part of their CI/CD processes and use it together with Spot’s Elastigroup to deploy jobs running on spot instances. This integration has helped our customers realize up to 90% savings on cloud computing, and seamlessly fits into their existing DevOps workflows.

Building a frictionless Azure Support Workflow

This blog is a write up on one of the best webinars hosted by Serverless360, “Building a frictionless Azure Support Workflow”, presented by Michael Stephenson. In this session, Michael Stephenson, Microsoft Azure MVP, who has extensive experience coaching organizations to adopt Microsoft Azure successfully, will walk us through the Serverless360, highlighting the product capabilities to address the business challenges from an operational and support perspective.

Chocolate Chip Cookies And AWS Costs: What If We Ran Bakeries Like We Run SaaS Companies?

When you work in tech, there are certain truths about the holiday season you can always count on. For example, you’ll be holding your breath up until New Years waiting to see if deals will come across the line. The end-of-year planning you intended to have done by December 31, will inevitably bleed into January. And, without a doubt, you’ll spend your holidays trying to explain to your relatives what exactly it is that you do.

Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure: A Complete Migration, Cost Management, and Optimization Checklist

The success of your enterprise’s digital transformation relies in no small part on your hybrid cloud infrastructure, which SearchCloud Computing defines as “a cloud computing environment that uses a mix of on-premises, private cloud and third-party, public cloud services with orchestration between these platforms.” Because this infrastructure is not a homogeneous environment, migration, management, and optimization can be an ongoing challenge.

Spot publishes module collection in Ansible Galaxy

Ansible is an open-source IT automation engine that automates provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, orchestration, and many other IT processes. It is one of the most widely-used provisioning tools in the industry to enable infrastructure as code (IAC), made popular by its ease of use and simple, but powerful automation. With easy integration, you can use Ansible and Spot to fully automate and optimize your cloud infrastructure.

Five Cloud Networking Deployment Mistakes That Will Cost You

Useful tips to better plan, monitor, and troubleshoot your public cloud networking Cloud networking across a myriad of applications, clouds, and data centers can get complex. And with the rapid pace of transition to the cloud, you'll need to prepare for new concepts like VPCs, cloud interconnects, and multiple availability zones and regions. Kentik has put together a list of the top five cloud networking deployment mistakes to avoid so you can take full advantage of the cost savings and flexibility of the cloud.

Big Data Observability and Continuous Tuning at Scale

Increasingly, many organizations find that their current legacy monitoring solutions are no longer adequate in today's modern IT world. These enterprises find themselves struggling to manage and understand unprecedented amounts of data. With such large amounts of data needing to be dealt with, it is no wonder why it's a struggle for enterprises to leverage it for business success. Not to mention that optimizing performance and keeping costs in line is a technical challenge they must face at the same time.