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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Housetable uses AI and Data Science to predict what customer’s homes will be worth after renovation, to support users in securing financing that takes into account the real value of their property. With its AI-powered renovation intelligence, customers can enjoy a 100% digital experience with quick application via mobile app, dynamic approvals, and integrated payments both from banks and directly to contractors.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are excited to announce that D2iQ and Nutanix have partnered to provide a best-of-breed hybrid cloud solution for customers building cloud-native applications for Day 2 operations. The solution has been validated Nutanix Ready and the companies’ have a collaborative support relationship.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heritage applications are critical to any business, and ensuring that they are running exceptional in the latest environment is a priority. Heritage applications nesting on Windows Server 2008 R2 do not get support from Microsoft directly, and that’s a major concern for enterprises who have their entire business running on such platforms.

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

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

Learn how transitioning to AWS and AppDynamics is helping this team revolutionize the way property is bought and sold in Australia.

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

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

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

PolyWizz is an InsurTech company offering an end-to-end solution that automatically collects and analyzes customers’ pension and insurance portfolios upon customer approval, helping sales teams identify the customers who are most likely to buy and the most relevant products to offer them. The company had built their cloud solution in-house, and was looking for a managed partner who could provide added value, initially in cost optimization and cloud security.

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