Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

March 2022

AWS vs GCP: Top Cloud Services Logs to Watch and Why

The infrastructure and services running on public cloud platforms like Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) produce massive volumes of logs every day. An organization’s log data provides details about their entire IT environment in real time, or at any point in time in history.

[UPDATED] We're changing the way development environment URLs are generated

UPDATE 6 April 2022: There are times where we have to revisit our plan, and today is one of those times. Last week, we released a fix to solve some inconsistencies in how our development URLs are generated. Even though this change was not impacting any production environments, many customers reported that it was breaking their test integrations with third-party services, or that they were reaching a provisioning limit with our Let’s Encrypt certificates.

6 Common DynamoDB Issues

DynamoDB, the primary NoSQL database service offered by AWS, is a versatile tool. It’s fast, scales without much effort, and best of all, it’s billed on-demand! These things make DynamoDB the first choice when a datastore is needed for a new project. But as with all technology, it’s not all roses. You can feel a little lost if you’re coming from years of working with relational databases. You’re SQL and normalization know-how doesn’t bring you much gain.

Automated Just-In-Time Permissions Using JumpCloud+Torq

For security teams, properly managing which users can access resources and governing the level of access those users have is about as basic as locking the door at night. Understandably then, there are thousands of options available to fine-tune or revoke access, and it’s likely that issues come up daily for most companies—if not hourly.

The 9 Best AWS Management Tools You Can Use Right Now

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides over 200 fully-featured services, that aim to make the cloud affordable and cost-efficient for the companies that use the popular cloud provider. Yet, the average AWS customer wastes 30% to 35% of their cloud budget on unnecessary costs. But why? Many organizations running on AWS report challenges managing their infrastructure — and some engineers feel their native tools simply do not cut it for managing their enterprise applications.

How to set up Prometheus monitoring for your services

When you run applications in production, you need to monitor the infrastructure they run on - and collect important signals about application health like error rates and latency. In this episode of Engineering for Reliability with Google Cloud, Yuri will demonstrate how to instrument your service to expose application-specific telemetry with Prometheus and how to configure Google's managed service for Prometheus to collect those metrics.

AWS Migration Checklist For Startups

Suppose you are going to adopt AWS as your cloud provider. Whether you are migrating from some other cloud providers or it is your first time setting up your application’s infrastructure on the cloud, This article will be immensely beneficial for you. AWS is an industry leader in cloud innovation technologies and carries the largest market share among cloud providers.

CloudZero Achieves SOC 1 Compliance: Here's Why We Did It

For most companies it’s difficult to organize cloud spend because it relies on manual effort, like tagging. At CloudZero, we’re dedicated to helping customers make sense of their cloud investment without manual and repetitive work. Our code-driven approach to cost allocation makes it easy for customers to organize spend even if they have poor tagging, shared resources, or containerized infrastructure. Quite simply, we organize cloud spend better than anyone else in the world.

Serverless observability with OpenTelemetry and AWS Lambda

Nowadays, microservice architecture is a pattern that helps to innovate quicker by enabling easier scalability, giving language flexibility, improving fault isolation, etc. Systems built this way also bring some downsides. Moving parts, concurrent invocations, and different retries policies can make operating and troubleshooting such systems challenging. Without proper tools, correlating logs with metrics may be difficult. To overcome these challenges, you need observability.

What is Data Encryption and Why It's Recommended for Really Safe Online Security

Encryption has come a long, long way over the last few years. Something once reserved only for militaries and governments, encryption has been made super accessible and has become standard practice in the tech industry. Whether it’s texts, photos, or word docs - it can, and should, be encrypted. Put simply, encryption scrambles any file sent or stored online into unreadable nonsense that can only be translated (or decrypted) by a user with a key.

How to Migrate from BIND to AWS Route53 Safely in 3 Commands

Migrating your DNS to a cloud provider like Amazon’s Route53 service can be a daunting task. Thankfully, with dns-tools you can test your DNS records before and after the migration to ensure that everything made it across in one-piece. This is the three steps we follow when migrating to Route 53: Follow along below and in just 10 minutes you’ll know if everything will migrate smoothly for you.

Add severity levels to your alert policies in Cloud Monitoring

When you are dealing with a situation that fires a bevy of alerts, do you instinctively know which alerts are the most pressing? Severity levels are an important concept in alerting to aid you and your team in properly assessing which notifications should be prioritized. You can use these levels to focus on the issues deemed most critical for your operations and triage through the noise.

Open source security coverage and compliance with Ubuntu Pro on public clouds

For businesses utilising public clouds, choosing an open source platform offers considerable advantages. Open source solutions can help reduce costs, provide access to the most leading-edge enterprise-grade features, and eliminate risks such as vendor lock-in, lack of support, or long-term security maintenance.

How to Manage Cloud Adoption Without Impacting your Users

All companies are going through some form of cloud adoption - whether cloud migration for the first time, hybrid cloud adoption, or extending cloud-native with a newer microservice architecture. But, according to a recent survey by Aptum*, only 39% of companies are completely satisfied with their current rate of digital transformation.

The Top 6 Challenges Enterprises Face Deploying Kubernetes in Hybrid Cloud Environments

In a relatively short amount of time, Kubernetes has evolved from an internal container orchestration tool at Google to the most important cloud-native technology across the world. Its rise in popularity has made Kubernetes the preferred way to build new software experiences and modernize existing applications at scale in the cloud.

Business Activity Monitoring - Achieving end-to-end tracking on business process flow

Serverless360 is a Cloud management platform engineered for Microsoft Azure that brings enterprise-grade monitoring, tracing, remediation & governance under one roof. Everything you need to empower your Azure operations 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 operations teams need. Improve operational efficiency with a unified view of business transactions.

Business Applications - Unified Observability for seamless Azure operations

Serverless360 is a cloud management platform engineered for Microsoft Azure that brings enterprise-grade monitoring, tracing, remediation & governance under one roof. Everything you need to empower your Azure operations 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!

Azure Documenter - Autogenerate documentation to turn live Azure Subscriptions data into insights

Serverless360 is a Cloud management platform engineered for Microsoft Azure that brings enterprise-grade monitoring, tracing, remediation & governance under one roof. Everything you need to empower your Azure operations 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.

5 Cloud Predictions For 2022: Say Goodbye Legacy Cost Management

The past two years have seen erratic cloud spend thanks to the upheaval caused by the global pandemic. Looking ahead to 2022, business is beginning to normalize. Within that “new normal,” there is no question that cloud is more popular than ever, and Kubernetes is at an all-time high. Some companies are continuing to operate remote, or find that they are thriving thanks to an investment in the cloud.

Mist Clears the Way for Multicloud Observability

A multicloud strategy is a necessity for modern businesses, as the recent AWS outages made clear, but managing this infrastructure remains a huge challenge. Infrastructure management teams have long struggled to juggle diverse technology solutions, policies and services to get access to a point-in-time view of their resources. The result is either waste through overprovisioning or huge overheads for nitpicking manual management and repetitive tasks.

The 7 Best Cloud Financial Planning Solutions For Managing Costs

Making better decisions doesn’t always require more data. Finding the right data and making sure the right people have it at the right time does. This is particularly important for companies that use the cloud. Using cloud financial planning solutions is an excellent way to automate, extend, and align goals with business outcomes in light of the cloud’s complexity. The solution can also help eliminate cumbersome, error-prone manual processes.

AWS Centralized Logging Guide

The key challenge with modern visibility on clouds like AWS is that data originates from various sources across every layer of the application stack, is varied in format, frequency, and importance and all of it needs to be monitored in real-time by the appropriate roles in an organization. An AWS centralized logging solution, therefore, becomes essential when scaling a product and organization.

Welcome to 10GB of tmp storage with Lambda

Every Lambda function comes with 512MB of ephemeral storage in the shape of a /tmp directory. This storage space can be reused across multiple invocations for the same instance of a Lambda function. Each instance of a function has its own /tmp directory and data is not shared amongst different instances of a function.

What Are the Differences Between Elastic Beanstalk, EKS, ECS, EC2, Lambda, and Fargate?

Life before containerization was a sore spot for developers. The satisfaction of writing code was constantly overshadowed by the frustration of attempting to force code into production. For many, deployments meant hours of reconfiguring libraries and dependencies for each environment. It was a tedious process prone to error, and it led to a lot of rework. Today, developers can deploy code using new technology such as cloud computing, containers, and container orchestration.

AWS Cost Allocation Tags Explained: When Should You Use Them?

Knowing only how much you spent on your AWS bill each month isn’t enough to provide the cost visibility you need to make cost-aware engineering and business decisions. It's why AWS introduced tags. Tags enable AWS users to label their resources to track cost and usage in the vast AWS infrastructure. The goal of tagging is to help you understand who, what, and why your cloud spend is changing.

Logic App Best practices, Tips and Tricks: #7 Learn from failures

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 is often overlooked: learning from failures.

How to Scale your AWS Infrastructure - Part 2

Welcome to the second post in a series of “How to Scale your AWS Infrastructure”. In the first post, we talked about horizontal scaling, autoscaling, CI/CD, infrastructure automation, containerization, etc. In this post, we will continue the discussion around databases, loose coupling, caching, CDN, etc. Let’s start the discussion with database scaling.

Partner Amplification - Logz.io Achieves AWS Security Competency

We’ve got some outstanding news to share in the arena of security partnerships: Logz.io® Cloud-based SIEM has officially achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) Security Competency! This designation within the Logging, Monitoring, SIEM, Threat Detection, and Analytics category further demonstrates Logz.io’s proven commitment to delivering best-in-class security.

Decoding the robust Azure architectures with fail-proof monitoring

Have you just begun your cloud journey to Azure by moving away from on-prem? If so, it’s always better to opt for the right set of patterns and strategies for developing and monitoring your applications on the Azure cloud. In this webinar, Tord Glad Nordahl, Microsoft Azure MVP, exclusively exposed the secret sauce for building and monitoring innovative cloud-native applications. Major topics covered,

The Ugly Truth About (Most) Cloud Rightsizing Recommendations

Rightsizing is about finding the optimal cloud configuration options to ensure that you get the performance you need—within any given constraints you are operating under—at the lowest possible cost. This is a simple proposition, but deceptively so. For one thing, business requirements are constantly changing, meaning that your workloads must adapt to support them, which in turn changes their operating parameters.

Foolproof Cloud Monitoring: 6 Ways to Utilize the Tools at Your Disposal

The cloud offers unparalleled flexibility. However, that flexibility comes at a cost. The amount of moving pieces increases. The environment becomes more heterogeneous. So, if you want to stay on top of things, you need a more comprehensive view of your cloud infrastructure. After all, you don’t want your customers to realize that something has gone awry before your people do. In this post, I’m going to talk about cloud monitoring.

Logic App Best practices, Tips and Tricks: #6 Error handling... configure run after settings

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: implementing Error handling inside Logic Apps.

My data killed my cloud project!

As we push more data to the cloud, avoidable mistakes are hampering migration. The biggest culprit: messy data with inadequate security and integration.Data transfers seem to be the easiest part of cloud migration. After all, migrating applications is the biggest pain in the neck. Data replication and migration should be simple, something that’s done during the last step of the application and data migration process. Right?

Tutorial: How to Connect Jupyter Notebooks to Ocean for Apache Spark

Jupyter Notebook is a web-based interactive computational environment for creating notebook documents. It supports programming languages – such as Python, Scala, R – and is largely used for data engineering, data analysis, machine learning, and further interactive, exploratory computing. Think of notebooks like a developer console or terminal, but with an intuitive UI that allows for efficient iteration, debugging or exploration.

The Best Engineering OKRs: 5 Real Examples That Get Results

As a framework for goal-setting, the Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) methodology is an incredibly useful tool when implemented properly. It can help your engineering team better plan and stay aligned toward common objectives through the duration of the development process. On an individual level, OKRs can also encourage each team member to make personal progress toward their own goals or common team goals that would benefit the company.

How to Scale your AWS Infrastructure - Part 1

When designing a solution, you should keep future needs in mind. If the number of users increases dramatically in a short period of time, the solution should be scalable enough to handle the new growth. Making systems scalable on cloud is relatively easier as compared to scaling on-premises infrastructure. AWS has provided excellent tools/services to enable your applications for as much scalability as you want.

Nagios Alternatives: Migrating from Nagios to Sensu

If you have worked in any part of the application delivery lifecycle long enough, there’s a very good chance you have directly used or been a consumer of Nagios. For a period of time in the early 2000s, it was the go-to solution for basic server monitoring and alerts. Fast forward 20 years and you might be surprised how many organizations still rely on Nagios for mission critical workloads — although not without a fair amount of duct tape and super glue challenges.

AWS Budgets Vs. AWS Cost Explorer: The Ultimate Comparison Guide

AWS currently offers over 200 services. Some of those make up the AWS Cost Management suite. This group comprises AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR), AWS Budgets, AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Cost Categories, and AWS Cost Anomaly Detection. Budgets and Cost Explorer are an excellent pair of complementary tools in this group. They have similarities that cause users to wonder if they need both and, if so, why. Here is a brief overview of the differences between AWS Budgets and Cost Explorer.

How to Get Started with Heroku Logging

Heroku is a platform for deploying, running, and managing applications, which is written in a variety of programming languages, including Python, Java, C#, JavaScript, PHP, and others. Heroku's goal is to free you up to focus on your applications rather than infrastructure management. Logging is usually included in infrastructure management. Heroku provides a high-level log maintenance tool. In this Heroku logging article, we'll learn how to get the most out of Heroku logs.

Logic App Best practices, Tips and Tricks: #5 Delete comments

Are you surprised? Are you under where are the first four tips? I start this series of blog posts on my blog, and you can see and read the previous Best practices, Tips, and Tricks here: And I will be sharing some of them here and others on my blog. So stay tuned for both blogs. Of course, the most recurring task is adding comments to our triggers and actions, but it is always good to know you to delete them. Some of you may be thinking that is a trivial task, simple like adding a comment.

Platform.sh commits to helping its customers reduce carbon emissions from cloud activities

Platform.sh, a unified, secure, enterprise-grade platform for building, running and scaling web applications, has worked with Greenly to calculate its carbon emissions to provide a clear picture to its customers.

Why just one person can't buy things that work well

It's too difficult for product teams to find the right vendors. Vendors obscure details, promise everything or downright lie, have special pricing for those who know how to ask, and there are just too many of them! This problem is getting worse because of the "Cambrian explosion" in cloud tooling, a blossoming in the number of solutions and niche specializations.

Using InfluxDB as an IoT Edge Historian

InfluxDB is increasingly being used in IoT solutions to store data from connected devices. Now it can also be used on IoT edge gateways as a data historian to analyze, visualize and eventually transmit aggregated IoT data up to a centralized server. In this article we’re going to look at three simple ways you can connect an instance of InfluxDB on your IoT Edge device to another instance of InfluxDB in the cloud.

What is the Distributed Cloud?: The Hybrid Cloud Solution Driving the Future Workplace

“It’s in the cloud!” Whether you’re talking about workplace technology or struggling to explain file-sharing to a technologically-challenged relative, we’ve all been trying to learn the ins and outs of cloud computing over recent years. It’s no easy task, as cloud computing has been changing rapidly – which brings us to the latest evolution: the distributed cloud.

3 Metrics to Monitor When Using Elastic Load Balancing

One of the benefits of deploying software on the cloud is allocating a variable amount of resources to your platform as needed. To do this, your platform must be built in a scalable way. The platform must be able to detect when more resources are required and assign them. One method of doing this is the Elastic Load Balancer provided by AWS. Elastic load balancing will distribute traffic in your platform to multiple, healthy targets. It can automatically scale according to changes in your traffic.

What Are the Benefits of Investing in Cloud Storage Security?

As more and more businesses and individuals choose to store their data online, ensuring the safety of information is becoming exceptionally crucial. According to recent statistics from the Hosting Tribunal, over 95% of IT professionals use cloud storage. This number is expected to grow steadily.

Galileo Enhancements for Brocade Data Collection

Are you migrating to Azure or another public Cloud? A client of ours did, and they didn’t use Galileo Cloud Compass. Do you know what happened? They didn’t experience the savings they expected, and their Azure invoices were a lot more than expected—about 60% more. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that they didn’t have an accurate way to price their workload for the Cloud. Just think about understanding the pricing model for each of the major Cloud vendors!

Why Right-Sizing in the Cloud is Everything

Are you migrating to Azure or another public Cloud? A client of ours did, and they didn’t use Galileo Cloud Compass. Do you know what happened? They didn’t experience the savings they expected, and their Azure invoices were a lot more than expected—about 60% more. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that they didn’t have an accurate way to price their workload for the Cloud. Just think about understanding the pricing model for each of the major Cloud vendors!

Should Your Startup Use AWS Managed Services?

Let’s face it. Gaining a competitive advantage in the target market is expensive. Even if you have a good idea and its execution plan in mind, operations related to management, storage, networking, service provisioning, security, and application management will cost you a fortune. To say the least, a cutting-edge IT infrastructure, a reliable team, and a strategy for rapid product releases or expansion/scaling is a must for your product’s success.

10 Best Snowflake Monitoring Tools (Updated 2022)

The Snowflake data cloud offers powerful data warehousing, analytics, and processing tools. The platform can handle many data workloads on one platform, helping organizations turn data into actionable insight across teams, departments, and regions. Snowflake’s architecture is also unique. Compute and storage are completely independent and both are highly elastic. Yet, Snowflake's per-second billing and highly elastic compute model demand frequent usage and cost monitoring.

A Monitoring Reality Check: More of the Same Won't Work

On December 7, 2021, Amazon’s cloud services recently suffered a major outage that not only affected Amazon services, but also many third-party services we use day-to-day, including Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Alexa, Amazon deliveries and Amazon Ring. Causes for the outage, which began at 7:30 am PST and lasted nearly seven hours, were detailed in a Root Cause Analysis report published by AWS that shed light on factors that may have contributed to the extended length of the disruption.

Cloud Application Performance Monitoring

Source: APM in the new normal, survey by eG Innovations and DevOps Institute Cloud adoption is increasing at a rapid pace. The eG Innovations & DevOps Institute APM survey indicates that 88% of organizations are using at least one form of cloud technology. Organizations move to the cloud for agility – they can deploy and have applications running in the cloud in minutes. Cloud computing also offers options for high availability, automated backups, and such.

Why Enterprises Need Self Service Analytics

Self service analytics are becoming increasingly popular and essential in this data-driven world. For many businesses, there is a growing need for their internal departments to access their data and business intelligence and harness its power themselves. Traditionally, business intelligence processes are the purview of IT teams and data specialists.

Go 1.18 released on Platform.sh

As of yesterday, the team behind Go has released a new version 1.18 with some significant changes to the language. Those of you who want to start using these new features are in luck: you can do it right away on Platform.sh. If you’re already using Go on Platform.sh, you can upgrade by changing the number in the type key of your app configuration. In your.platform.app.yaml file: If you’re not yet using Go for your project, now’s a great time to give Go a try.

Ocean for Apache Spark goes GA on AWS

When Apache Spark introduced native support for Kubernetes it was a game changer for big data. Speed, scale and flexibility are now at the fingertips of data teams—-if they can master Kubernetes. It’s an uphill climb for even experienced DevOps teams. At Spot by NetApp, we’ve seen first-hand the challenges that companies are facing as they navigate the complexities of operating large-scale Kubernetes applications.

Deploy a Go app from repo to AWS

We are going to deploy a Go application directly from your repo to AWS with Cloud 66. Any application using any language on any framework can be deployed with Cloud 66 as long as it has a Dockerfile. Note: Rails applications are exceptions as we deploy them natively. If your application does not have a Dockerfile, we will suggest one for you based on your code. However, we would recommend reviewing what we have suggested and making sure the Dockerfile meets your requirements.

System Monitoring for AWS EC2 Cloud Instances with AWS CloudWatch

In this blog post, I follow on from my previous blog on AWS CloudWatch Part 1 of 2 to explore how you can go beyond basic agentless CloudWatch monitoring by deploying the CloudWatch agent and some of the key information and planning you need to do this. I’ll also cover how eG Enterprise offers out-of-the-box functionality to avoid complex JSON scripting or tooling to implement monitoring.

How to Optimize Cloud Monitoring Costs Using Flow Logs in Progress Flowmon

This blog post discusses some of the best practices for balancing the costs of cloud traffic monitoring while maintaining a reasonable level of visibility. Progress Flowmon 12 has introduced the processing of native flow logs from Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, plus it has enhanced support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) flow logs.

A guide to Microsoft Azure Regions

The global footprint of Microsoft Azure is made up of physical infrastructure of over 200 data centres and connective network components, arranged into regions, and linked by a large interconnected network. Each of the Azure data centres provides high availability, low latency, scalable cloud services close to users to improve reliability and speed. In this blog, we look at the Azure Regions, and explain the benefits of using a direct connection to access Azure infrastructure.

How To Conduct A Cloud Cost Analysis: A Step-By-Step Framework

Business leaders and team members face countless decisions every day, some of which are certain to have an impact on the future of a company. Perhaps the most impactful to a SaaS company’s bottom line are financial decisions related to the cloud. Engineers and team leads need to know which cloud architecture choices are worthwhile and which should be scrapped in favor of a more cost effective model.

Observability for AWS Fargate Deployments Powered by Graviton2 Processors

Today, cloud native technologies empower a number of organizations to build and run scalable applications in public, private and hybrid cloud environments. Developer and operation teams can build and deploy applications, APIs and microservices architectures with the speed and immutability of containers. Gartner predicts that by 2024, more than 75% of large enterprises in mature economies will be using containers in production.

Reel in your activities: announcing cancellable activities and crons

Feature announcement: You can now cancel Platform.sh activities through the CLI and management console. Last year we released activity scripts, custom scripts that you can upload to your projects to run in response to any project or environment activity. In March we announced parallel activities, a queue that allows two simultaneous processes across your environments. Today we’re announcing another change to your activities—you can now cancel them.

How Are Tech Advancements Positively Affecting Companies Market Agility

There's no question that technology has had a profound impact on the way companies do business. With advancements in cloud computing, mobile technology, and big data analytics, businesses can become more agile than ever before. This allows them to react quickly to changes in the market and capitalize on new opportunities. This blog post will explore how these tech advancements are helping companies become more agile and successful in today's competitive landscape.

Introducing New Storage Dashboards in the Cloud Monitoring Console (CMC)

Monitoring and gaining additional insights about usage of your Splunk Cloud Platform deployment is essential for effective management as a Splunk admin. Your Splunk Cloud comes with the Cloud Monitoring Console (CMC) app, which displays relevant information about the status of your Splunk Cloud environment using pre-built dashboards.

Deploying Docker Containers on AWS: Elastic Beanstalk vs ECS vs EKS

Containerization packages a software component and its environment, dependencies, and configuration into an isolated unit called a container. That makes it possible to deploy an application consistently across different computing environments, whether on-premises or on the cloud. The concept of containerization is more than a decade old.

SaaS Observability Done Right

SaaS (software as a service) is the common model for many businesses today. Even longstanding behemoths such as Cisco and Microsoft have been strategically shifting their software products to SaaS and recurring revenue models (just think Office365 shift from licensed Office). These SaaS businesses need agility to move fast and remain competitive. This means agility in the IT stack, but also agility in the business models to support bottom-up GTM and product-led growth (PLG).

Top 12 Kubernetes Risks

What’s putting your K8s workloads at risk? You probably didn’t immediately think of memory and CPU resources—yet, these pose significant threats to cost and performance in your public cloud Kubernetes and OpenShift deployments. Learn about the top 12 K8s risks and how you can visualize the spread of risk in your containers deployment. You'll also hear a methodology for drilling down to individual misconfigurations and resolving them.

AWS Cost Categories Vs. Tags: How To Get True Cloud Cost Visibility

Although Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced cost categories a few years ago, many people still struggle to understand the difference between them and AWS tags. If this sounds familiar to you, you are not alone. This quick guide will walk you through AWS Cost Categories, how they work, and how they differ from tags in AWS.

Anodot Cloud Costs vs. CloudHealth by VMWare

We are often asked what’s the difference between Anodot and CloudHealth. Since both platforms offer cloud cost management solutions, the differentiation might be unclear. In this article, we’ll quickly clarify what each platform is built for, and why — despite some overlaps in features — these are two fundamentally different creatures.

Enhanced monitoring for your Azure Logic App

Implementing a business process can be challenging because you typically need to make various services work together. Think about everything your company uses to store and process data. How do you integrate all these products? Azure Logic Apps gives you pre-built components to connect to hundreds of services. You use a graphical design tool to put the pieces together in any combination you need, and Logic Apps will run your process automatically in the cloud.

Getting Started with Splunk on Google Cloud

In April 2021, Splunk launched Splunk Cloud on Google Cloud. Since then, a large and growing number of integrations, applications, tools, and solutions have been created to enable or enhance use cases across data protection, productivity, safer remote working and other security visibility needs. We’ve highlighted a few of the more noteworthy additions below for any current or prospective users of Splunk Cloud on Google Cloud.

What is Malware & How to Protect Ourselves From Computer Viruses

Do you remember when viruses used to be funny and not such a big deal? Maybe a cat would constantly pop up on your desktop or you’d get spammed with hundreds of ads for male enhancement pills? Well, the early 2000s are over (yes, it’s depressing) and malware has advanced far beyond its somewhat quirky origins. Today, viruses have become extremely sophisticated and it’s difficult to know for sure if your files have been infected or not. So what is malware exactly?

A guide to AWS Regions & Zones

Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to extend its availability globally, with the AWS Cloud spanning 84 Availability Zones within 26 geographic regions around the world. In this blog, we look at how Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) platforms such as Console Connect can enhance the performance of your AWS assets and applications through direct and on-demand connections.

Engineering's Role In Setting A Winning SaaS Pricing Strategy

Companies that effectively implement SaaS pricing and packaging have the distinct advantage of being able to provide their customers with a high level of value at a reasonable price. And, they’re able to do it in a way that is profitable and worthwhile for the business. The problem is that packaging and pricing SaaS products is anything but simple. There are a lot of variables involved in deciding on a SaaS product’s pricing strategy.

Get more insights from your Java applications logs

Today it is even easier to capture logs in your Java applications. Developers can get more data with their application logs using a new version of the Cloud Logging client library for Java. The library populates the current executing context implicitly with every ingested log entry. Read this if you want to learn how to get HTTP requests and tracing information and additional metadata in your logs without writing a single line of code.

The Top 4 Reasons to Start Your Observability Pipeline Journey with Cribl.Cloud

Talk to anyone in the tech space and you’ll likely hear horror stories of how home lab setups can grow out of control or about long lists of VMs used to test various software systems. As a Criblanian, I’m no exception – I have at least a half dozen instances of Cribl LogStream deployed everywhere from my local machine, on docker containers, or on a few EC2 instances in AWS.

Step-by-Step Setup of VMware Tanzu Community Edition on AWS

In this video, Steve Pousty walks through the essential steps required to install VMware Tanzu Community Edition on AWS. Follow along as he provides useful tips and detailed explanations while he prepares his environment, then sets up both management and workload clusters on AWS from a Windows computer using WSL2. His clear presentation will help you get your own environment up and running quickly.

Pop the pain away - with Aiven (20 sec)

Don't stress! Aiven’s fully managed data solutions take the pain out of cloud infra – everything is already set up for you. Just select the services and tools you need, pick a cloud provider and your storage needs, and you’re good to go. You can deploy a cluster in under 10 minutes. We offer rock solid, reliable, open source data infra – with no hidden costs.

Azure DevOps: Fun with Observability Events and Alerts!

If you’re working with microservices in a large distributed environment, you’ve probably got your monitoring and logging on lock, and you may even be lucky enough to have properly instrumented APM (distributed tracing) for consumer calls. But, did you know you’re likely still facing an observability gap? How many incidents have you worked that required hours of sleuthing only to end with a single team needing to roll back a deployment? It’s more common than you may think!

Is the cloud secure?

The cloud is a solution that allows you to access data and documents from anywhere and from any medium whether it is a computer, a tablet or a phone. But is your data really secure? A secure cloud ensures the privacy, security and compliance of all stored data. All these aspects must be taken into account when using a cloud solution to ensure the security of your information.

Stop wasting your time! A modern development workflow for WordPress, using Platform.sh plus third-party tools

To quote my colleague, Chad, WordPress “remained tremendously popular since its release in 2003”. For many, WordPress remains by far the CMS that is easiest to adopt, and that provides a fast time to market in the majority of use cases. There is so much high-quality material out there for WordPress, be it OSS or Premium, that one can have beautiful sites powered by an easy-to-use CMS up and running in no time.

The Cloud Hasn't Stood Still, So Why Have Our Expectations?

Our ongoing love affair with the cloud doesn’t show any signs of slowing. In 2021, end-user spending on public cloud services alone is predicted to reach $332 billion — or, to put it another way, more than the GDP of Chile, Finland or Vietnam. This affection is understandable. The cloud lets organizations build or adopt new services, expand to new regions and scale their offerings faster, more simply and — if used correctly — at lower cost than ever before.

How to Setup AWS CloudWatch Agent Using AWS Systems Manager

Before we jump into this, it’s important to note that older names, and still in use in some areas of AWS, are often referred to SSM which stands for Simple Systems Manager. AWS Systems Manager is designed to be a control panel for your AWS resources so you can manage them externally without having to SSH into the resources individually. What is important to remember with AWS Systems Manager is that features contained within the tool may occur additional pricing.

What a delayed SD-WAN or SASE decision could cost you

Winners make good decisions fast, execute them quickly, and see higher growth rates and/or overall returns from their decisions. That’s according to a McKinsey study, ‘Decision-Making In The Age Of Urgency’. But the same study also pointed out that ineffective decision-making has significant implications for company productivity today. On average, survey respondents said they spent 37 percent of their time making decisions.

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Detect and Fix Slow Proxies For SaaS and Cloud

Crowdsourcing is becoming an essential part of many enterprises, from big companies to startups. This is because it is an incredible way of creating an ecosystem to facilitate different processes within a business. Leveraging the Exoprise platform, companies can benchmark their slow proxies, detect, and fix slow network experiences. Crowdsourcing entails getting information, goods, or services from disparate people worldwide. Often, crowdsourcing is made possible through the magic of cloud-based applications and platforms because of the way the Internet connects people and organizations. Exoprise specializes in crowdsourced monitoring of cloud and SaaS services. We call it crowd-powered.

How to Deploy Mattermost on AWS Via Opta

A common denominator that Mattermost and most corporate applications share is the challenge users can face in successfully setting up a self-hosted instance in their own cloud account. Even with cloud-specific documentation, there’s almost always a hard requirement of understanding said documentation, resolving any errors encountered along the way, and maintaining the application.

The Hidden Magic Of Extensions

As serverless architectures start to grow, finding the right troubleshooting approach becomes a business-critical aspect. This talk will dive into "the instrumentation approach" - keep track of internal events on the lambda and export processed telemetry data. We should handle legacy code, multiple code owners, and a massive stack of serverless technologies as with any real-life project. Our goal is to write as least code as possible, avoid any existing code changes, be cross-runtime, and leave no latency impact.

Serverless in production, lessons learned after 5 years

Serverless has changed the way we build software for the better. But it’s also a paradigm shift that challenges many of our pre-existing practices and habits, like how we test our code and how we monitor their health. In this session, Yan Cui will share many of the lessons he has learned from running serverless in production over the last five years. Including tips on testing, observability, and how to keep your AWS cost in check.

7 CloudCheckr Alternatives And Competitors

With CloudCheckr, users can manage the cost, security, and compliance of their public cloud. It also offers a VMware-to-AWS migration service. But the platform's multi-level pricing structure can confuse some customers. Others feel CloudCheckr is overkill for their current cloud adoption stage. This quick guide walks you through cloud management tools like CloudCheckr.

Shipa Cloud Operations and Practices

Shipa Cloud is how we run the Shipa control plane on behalf of users in order to give them the fastest path possible to implementing Application as Code within their clusters. You can try out Shipa Cloud for free today by going to shipa.io. Besides being the fastest way possible to get started with Shipa, it also takes away the responsibility of upgrades, maintenance, and uptime of the control plane for our users, but that responsibility doesn’t just disappear.

Integrating Azure Key Vault With AKS Cluster

I recently had the pleasure of presenting a webinar with Microsoft Reactor. It was on implementing Azure Key Vault (a centralized place to manage all of your highly sensitive information on Azure). In this webinar, I share a step-by-step demonstration of how to integrate your information with the AKS cluster. The goal is to implement a solution that will allow an integration between Azure Key Vault, where I will store all my secrets; and my AKS, where I will use them.

Global Software Company Improves Spark Performance and Cuts Wastage

One of our clients is a software developer that specializes in design and manufacturing software solutions. This software firm caters to some of the biggest organizations operating in primary sectors like engineering, architecture, manufacturing, entertainment, and more. Every new software and update our client rolls out must meet stringent SLA requirements.

Serverless Heroes Discuss The Latest Trends in Serverless Development

***Please note that the audio turns on at the 45 second mark*** How Lumigo Monitors Its Production Monitoring your production is challenging. Lumigo processes more than 1.5B Lambda invocations per month and digests 25TB of data monthly. Many things can go wrong. In this session, I will explain how Lumigo operates its production from tools to processes.

Cycle Podcast | Episode 11 "Rising Cloud + Cycle.io" Featuring Sean Brown, Chief Product Officer

In this episode, Jake Warner chats with Sean Brown of Rising Cloud. Discussions include some background and an overview on Rising Cloud, Stateful vs. Stateless, and how both companies are coming together to solve developer-centric needs.

4 Tips To Improve Your Company's Cloud Visibility

The struggle for better cloud visibility is common amongst software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies. SaaS applications are more complex than on-premise solutions by nature — there is a lot more surface area to consider. Distributed and multi-tenant systems are inherently more complex. Distributed systems, as often found in cloud architectures, are generally scaled out horizontally much more so than traditional single instance applications.

How Your Cloud Application Monitoring Data Can Help You Make Clearer Business Decisions

Companies are increasingly adopting cloud services. They’re cost-efficient, scalable, and give you time to market by getting your ideas out there as quickly as possible. However, cloud services don’t have extensive, in-built cloud application monitoring. This is where Netreo steps in. Let’s take a look at what cloud computing is. After that, we’ll dive into cloud application monitoring and how it affects business decisions.

Cloud Governance: What It Is and Why You Need It

Every company exerts some level of effort to manage costs, performance, and risk in their hybrid cloud environment. But to ensure that those activities are performed consistently and efficiently across the board, you need a framework of policies, processes, controls, and tracking. In other words, you need cloud governance.