Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

February 2023

What's the Difference Between Gen 1 and Gen 2 VMs?

Virtual machines (VMs) have been around for quite some time now and have become a cornerstone of modern-day IT infrastructure. They provide a convenient way to run multiple operating systems on a single physical machine, allowing users to consolidate their hardware and save costs. However, as VM technology has evolved, newer versions of VMs have been introduced, such as generation 1 and generation 2 VMs.

How does Cloudify Manage the Lifecycle of VNFs and Network Services in ETSI MANO

In 2021, Cloudify introduced the Agile-First approach to 5G network orchestration, creating a bridge between the Telco and DevOps worlds. In those previous POCs, Cloudify proved to be a platform built to support agile service delivery and multiple interfaces that allow multi-vendor flexible solution integration. Today, Cloudify takes the next step to provide a vendor-agnostic solution in 5G and the public cloud.

Choosing the Right AWS Messaging Service for Your Application

With the dawn of microservices and serverless, event-driven architectures have become the way to go when building a new system in the cloud. This approach has allowed for greater scalability, as the system can easily adapt and respond to changes in traffic or demand without having to overhaul the entire architecture. Additionally the Event-driven approach means your application is mainly concerned with routing event data to the right services.

Deploy Access Restricted Azure website from DevOps Pipelines

We have a couple of internal websites hosted on Azure. Websites that require authentication and should only be accessed from our IP. This can easily be configured using Access Restrictions in Azure. But when doing so, you exclude the dynamic IP range for Microsoft-hosted Azure DevOps build agents. In this post, I'll show you how we set up deployment to the Access Restricted websites with a bit of PowerShell magic.

How do I Access Blob Storage? A Step-by-Step Guide

Blob Storage is a highly scalable and secure cloud storage solution offered by Microsoft Azure. It allows users to store unstructured data like text, images, videos, and audio files. Accessing Blob Storage is crucial for developers, IT professionals, and business owners who want to manage their data and applications in the cloud. In this article, we will discuss how to access Blob Storage using different methods and tools.

Azure Monitor Pros and Cons

Enterprise use of Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Services is expanding at an unprecedented rate as cloud computing usage expands. However, enterprises that have recently switched to Azure continue to have serious concerns about monitoring their applications efficiently. As the business overgrows, it is essential to understand its functioning and health simultaneously.

Sweet Trick! Mastering O11y for Cloud-Native Technologies

Using the cloud can be challenging. Everyone likes to tell stories about a surprise cloud bill they received and laugh, but let’s be honest: it’s happened to all of us. When dealing with complex cloud environments and cloud-native architectures, gaining visibility into the state of the environment is critical. Today, developers are looking to monitor how things are working and performing as part of every step in the software development life cycle.

10 Ways to Optimize your Azure cost

In modern times, building and publishing an application has become very easy with Cloud-based deployment. Users don’t need to worry about infrastructure-related challenges like availability, reliability, scalability, etc. The cloud providers are responsible for keeping the deployment flow simple and intact. Providing many advantages and coherence, the high cost incurred for such benefits is the downside.

Understanding Hyper-V Checkpoints: A Comprehensive Guide

Hyper-V is a virtualization platform developed by Microsoft that allows users to create and manage virtual machines (VMs) on Windows operating systems. One of the features of Hyper-V is checkpoints, which allow users to capture the state of a VM at a particular point in time. Hyper-V checkpoints are essential for many tasks, such as testing software in a safe and isolated environment, creating backups of virtual machines, and rolling back a virtual machine to a previous state if something goes wrong.

Azure Stateful Node is now in General Availability

We are excited to announce that Azure Stateful Node is now in General Availability. This unique, proprietary development follows the ongoing success of AWS Stateful Node and the increasing demand from our customers working in Azure. With Azure Stateful Node, Spot by NetApp’s customers can now run their stateful compute workloads on Azure with up to 90% immediate cost reduction and maximum availability.

3 Common GCP Billing Challenges - And How CloudZero Overcomes Them

Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Google’s answer to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, is steadily gaining steam. Launched in 2008 — just two years after AWS — GCP has taken the bronze medal in public cloud services for years. While it still occupies third place, its market share has steadily expanded: In Q4 2021, GCP owned 9% of the public cloud market, and by Q3 2022, it had jumped to 11%.

Reducing Your Cloud Spend - Civo Webinars

In this session, Mark Boost, Dinesh Majrekar, and Saiyam Pathak discuss the current state of the cloud industry and why costs are high, how to take steps to reduce spending, and how Civo can help. Mark Boost (CEO, Civo) explores the cost of cloud in this talk, looking at the history and current state of the cloud industry to uncover why costs are high and what can be done about it.

Managing Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) with the D2iQ Kubernetes Platform (DKP)

This video describes how to use the D2iQ Kubernetes Platform (DKP) to manage an existing CNCF-conformant cluster created with Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Getting to Kubernetes is a first step. Getting Kubernetes into production is quite another! You've got a few clusters in place already, and they may even be in production, but what you need now is some way to manage them all from the same place. DKP can help! You can use DKP to manage existing clusters as well as new clusters you create with DKP itself.

Multi-Cloud Deployment: Deploying Consistent Infrastructure Across AWS, GCP, Azure + More

Moving to the cloud is no small feat, especially for enterprise-scale infrastructure. And just imagine the complications when you need to deploy across more than one cloud. Multi-cloud deployment is sometimes characterized by slow, error-prone workloads, lack of consistency, and inflexibility that holds users back. In this blog, we’ll provide clear definitions, use cases, benefits, challenges, and factors to consider for multi-cloud deployment.

Rethink your Cloud strategy in 2023

Gartner forecasts that worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services will grow 20.7% from $490.3 billion in 2022 to $591.8 billion in 2023. By 2026, the Public Cloud market will double its size today to $1 trillion, also predicted by Gartner. AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud all maintained double-digit growth in Q4 2022, especially Google Cloud grew 32% to $7.32 billion. CDN giant Akamai also unveiled Akamai Connected Cloud and New Cloud Computing Services on Feb 14, 2023.

SCCM Software Center Cannot Be Loaded: How to Troubleshoot the Issue?

System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) is an enterprise-level tool that allows IT administrators to manage software and updates on a large number of devices. However, sometimes users encounter an issue where the software center in SCCM cannot be loaded. This error can prevent users from accessing software, updates, and other features, causing frustration and productivity loss.

Migrating On-Premises File Shares to Azure File Storage

As businesses grow, so does their need for scalable and secure data storage. For many companies, on-premises file shares have long been the preferred method of storing and sharing data. However, with the advent of cloud computing, more and more businesses are turning to cloud-based storage solutions like Azure File Storage. In this article, we will explore the challenges and solutions involved in migrating on-premises file shares to Azure File Storage.

18 Best Practices for Cloud Automation

Everyone is shifting their workloads to the cloud, but one challenge remains: Workloads need to be automated. Whether they’re employing a cloud-native, cloud server, or hybrid model—IT operations teams need to know what, when, and now also where to automate. Speaking at the recent 2022 Automation Virtual Summit, Dave Kellermanns, Global Advisor for Automation, Broadcom Software explored some lessons learned and best practices for cloud automation. Read on to see some of the highlights.

Autonomously optimize AWS Lambda deployments with Sedai and Datadog

In dynamic production environments, unpredictable traffic loads and frequent code changes can make it difficult for organizations to consistently optimize their cloud infrastructure, resulting in application performance issues, latency, and wasted cloud spend. Teams that manage large-scale cloud infrastructure deployments are often forced to tune their workloads’ configurations using a complicated mesh of script jobs—or worse, manual remediation by on-call engineers prompted by alerts.

Amazon Kinesis Pricing Explained: A 2023 Guide To Kinesis Costs

Kinesis is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) product that collects, processes, and analyzes streaming data in real-time. It can process streaming video, audio, IoT data, application logs, and other data coming in from thousands of unique sources as it arrives, unlike technologies like Hadoop, which utilize batch processing (waiting for a complete dataset to arrive before processing and analyzing it).

How to track the failures in microservice applications?

Microservices architecture (often shortened to microservices) is an architectural style for developing applications. Microservices allow a large application to be separated into smaller independent parts, each having its own realm of responsibility. To serve a single user request, a microservices-based application can call on many internal microservices to compose its response. It is critical to track failures in microservice to take corrective actions and keep the business process ongoing.

SolarWinds named supplier on the Crown Commercial Service's G-Cloud 13 framework to provide secure cloud services

G-Cloud 13 serves as an online catalogue where public sector customers can buy cloud-based computing services, and with SolarWinds as a named supplier, it's never been easier to support public sector organisations with its services.

Ensuring High Availability with Azure Datacentre Redundancy

In today’s fast-paced business environment, downtime can have severe consequences for any organization. It can lead to lost revenue, decreased productivity, and loss of customer trust. Therefore, it is essential to ensure that your business-critical applications are always available, no matter what. This is where Azure Datacentre Redundancy comes into play.

What the Heck Is Hybrid Cloud Storage and Why It's the Smart Choice

Cloud are on the rise! User concerns about data storage security and their need for quick access to databases are driving the development of cloud technologies. At the moment, the most progressive and convenient solution is hybrid cloud storage. The significant current popularity and predicted growth in demand for hybrid cloud technologies in the near future are not just speculation. They are evidenced by research.

5 considerations for choosing a modern PaaS

Keeping your website or app up-to-date with the latest tools, frameworks, and security compliance is important for maintaining a successful online presence. That’s why when it comes to web infrastructure, you need to follow today’s absolute best practices, so you can deliver the best possible digital experiences to your audiences. Here are five major ways you can ensure you’re running a state-of-the-art PaaS.

What are Managed Cloud Services?

The cloud has fundamentally changed how organizations work with technology. The days of an on-prem infrastructure and endpoints with a physical data center are starting to be seen in the rearview mirror by many businesses, and now nearly half of all corporate data is stored in the cloud. There are multiple factors that have caused this change and increased the transition to the cloud, but one of the main supporting factors that makes this possible is the use of managed cloud services.

The Definitive DevOps Tools List: 55 Tools For 2023

DevOps has exploded in popularity since the concept first emerged in 2009. A DevOps approach encompasses both practices and tools that engineers use to build quality software more rapidly. Before DevOps, software development followed a “waterfall” model. Back then, developers would code first, then perform quality assurance (QA) testing, and fix any bugs or errors as necessary.

Azure Blob Storage vs. Azure Table Storage: Which One is Right for You?

When it comes to storing data in the cloud, there are many options to choose from. Azure, one of the leading cloud service providers, offers a wide range of storage options, including Azure Blob Storage and Azure Table Storage. Both are designed to help businesses store and manage large amounts of data, but they have different use cases and capabilities. In this article, we will compare Azure Blob Storage and Azure Table Storage and help you determine which one is right for your business needs.

Getting Started with Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus

As you scale your services in production, you also need to scale your monitoring. Managing Prometheus at scale to handle increasingly large metric volumes can be a huge operational challenge, but Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus is here to help. We’re excited to introduce Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus and help you scale by removing operational toil!

10 Alternatives To Layoffs For Tech Companies In 2023

Alphabet. Netflix. Shopify. Amazon. Meta. Microsoft. These are just a few of the leading tech companies that recently laid off thousands of employees. Slashing jobs, because it is often one of the biggest expenses for tech companies, may seem like a quick fix, but it can be counterproductive, especially when it impacts experienced engineers. So, what are the specific reasons tech companies are cutting jobs? And what are the alternatives to layoffs?

Get notified on Azure app registration client secret expiration!

Azure AD app registration identities are used to provide access to specific resources in Azure. We use some App Registrations in Azure, for example, the security concerns, many organisations dislike enabling users to build Azure Active Directory (AAD) and Service Principals (SP). Building a manual process, on the other hand, might be a bottleneck and a time sink. However, you can build an Office365 form for users to request AAD application registration.

Importing your Cloudwatch Metrics into Prometheus

Cloudwatch is the de facto method of consuming logs and metrics from your AWS infrastructure. The problem is, it is not the de facto method of capturing metrics for your applications. This creates two places where observability is stored, and can make it difficult to understand the true state of your system. That’s why it has become common to unify all data into one place, and Prometheus offers an open-source, vendor-agnostic solution to that problem.

AWS Configuration for the Cribl Pack for SentinelOne Cloud Funnel

In the blog titled “Streamline Endpoint Data with Cribl Pack for SentinelOne Cloud Funnel” we dove into the Cloud Funnel data, its relevance in the modern SOC, and how Cribl Stream transforms the data while addressing visibility gaps. We left the AWS-specific details to this blog for those not yet familiar with configuring AWS S3 buckets, SQS Queues, and Identity and Access Management (IAM).

6 Best Private Cloud Storage To Choose From in 2023

It's a proven fact that everyone is becoming more and more immersed in the online world. Digitalization is now a normal part of modern life, from using social networks to automating processes. Nowadays, everyone is using cloud storage to save photos and documents because of either a lack of storage space or the convenience of the cloud. Cloud service has become an everyday thing.

Azure Blob Storage vs. Google Cloud Storage - Which is Better for Your Data Storage Needs?

In the digital age, storing data on-premise is becoming less popular as more businesses are moving their data to the cloud. Cloud storage services offer scalability, accessibility, and cost-effectiveness, making them an attractive option for businesses of all sizes. Azure Blob Storage and Google Cloud Storage are two popular cloud storage services that offer different features and benefits to their users.

How We Used CloudZero To Find $1.7M Of Annualized Cloud Savings

It all started with a simple Slack message. If you need a refresher, gross margin is a business metric that calculates what percentage of revenue you take home as profit. To calculate it, you subtract your costs (often abbreviated as COGS, short for costs of goods sold) from your revenue and divide it by your total revenue, et voilà, gross margin. So, if your annual revenue is $10M and your COGS are $3M, your gross margin is 70%. Gross margin plays an integral role in SaaS company valuations.

Implementing a Cost-aware Cloud Networking Infrastructure

Cloud networking is the IT infrastructure necessary to host or interact with applications and services in public or private clouds, typically via the internet. It’s an umbrella term for the devices and strategies that connect all variations of on-premise, edge, and cloud-based services.

How to achieve distributed tracing using Application Insights?

In this blog, we will explore how distributed tracing works in Application Insights and how to use it to diagnose the issues in a distributed application. Azure Application Insights is a powerful tool for monitoring and diagnosing application performance issues and supports distributed tracing. It is an extension of Azure Monitor and provides Application Performance Monitoring features out of the box.

How to Setup Azure Files

Azure Files is a fully managed cloud-based file share service provided by Microsoft Azure. It allows users to store and share files in the cloud, with support for the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol, which is commonly used by Windows file shares. Azure Files provides a number of advantages for users, including: Azure Files is often used by organizations that need to share files across multiple locations or teams, or that need to provide secure access to files for remote or mobile workers.

OpenTelemetry on AWS, beyond instrumentation and into resource attributes

Instrumenting your code is essential to understanding your system’s performance and diagnosing issues as they arise. Traditionally, this was accomplished using proprietary vendor libraries, causing major lock-in. Enter OpenTelemetry. OpenTelemetry is an open-source project that provides a set of APIs, SDKs, and integrations for instrumenting code.

Google Drive vs. Google Cloud Storage: What's the Difference?

Google Drive and Google Cloud Storage are both cloud storage solutions, though they differ in purpose. Google created them to provide individuals or businesses with the exact capabilities and features to encourage collaboration and allow users to access their files from anywhere. Want to know which one is more suitable for your business? Keep reading to discover their differences and similarities!

Cloud Rate Optimization: How To Optimize Your Cloud Rates

When a company moves from an on-premises data center to the cloud, they expect changes to affect engineering decisions and functionality. After all, their whole way of building and supporting new products has changed. What many companies don’t expect is that the switch to working with cloud providers also necessitates new budgeting and accounting practices.

End-to-End Hybrid Deployment of 5G Network Services and Applications on AWS

In this blog, we describe how Cloudify, AWS, Intel, Proto, and Mavenir orchestrate the deployment of 5G core network as well as deploying applications that utilize these 5G services. At MWC 2022, we showcased the intend-based orchestration demonstrating that SLA based KPI can be used to place a workload anywhere in the cloud continuum, using AWS EKS for workload in Region, LocalZone, and Outposts.

Comparison of GCP, Azure and AWS Cloud Storage: Which One to Choose?

Cloud storage has become an essential component for businesses of all sizes. It allows you to store and access your data on a remote server, providing flexibility, scalability, and cost-effectiveness. However, with multiple cloud storage providers available, it can be challenging to choose the right one for your business needs. In this article, we will compare the three most popular cloud storage providers, GCP, Azure, and AWS, to help you make an informed decision.

The Social Risks and Dangers of Runaway Cloud Computing

Many of the most disruptive tech developments, such as artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR), and remote and hybrid working platforms, have been fueled by the continuous broad use of cloud computing. According to a 2022 report by Statista, a large majority of businesses now use multiple public cloud providers, with 90% of large enterprises and 60% of small businesses currently implementing a multi-cloud strategy.

Amazon ECS Pricing Explained: A 2023 Guide To ECS Costs

With containerization, you can write an application once and run it anywhere. Along with portability, containers are also much more resource-efficient than traditional virtual machines (VMs). However, managing containers at scale can be challenging. Besides, many teams find container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes overkill and too complex.

Logic App Best practices, Tips, and Tricks: #21 Moving or organizing shapes inside Visual Studio Logic App designer

Today I’m going to speak about another important Best practice, Tips and Tricks that you need to consider while designing your business processes (Logic Apps): Moving or Organizing shapes inside Visual Studio Logic App designer.

What Are Azure Queues and How Do They Work?

As more and more applications move to the cloud, it becomes increasingly important to design them for high availability, scalability, and reliability. One of the key components of building such applications is message queuing, which allows you to send and receive messages between different parts of your application. Azure Queues is a service provided by Microsoft Azure that enables developers to build highly scalable and distributed applications that can handle large volumes of messages.

TensorFlow Inference of Visual Images, Orchestrated by Cloudify, with Intel Optimizations

The following blog was written together with Petar Torre, Solutions Architect at Intel. This blog describes how Cloudify automates the deployment and monitoring of Machine Learning systems, by orchestrating an Intel-optimized TensorFlow workload running inference with a pre-trained ResNet-50 model from the Intel Model Zoo. In a nutshell, a container running a Jupyter Notebook with the Intel optimized TensorFlow model is scheduled as a Kubernetes pod on K3S on AWS EC2.

Unlocking the Potential of Machine Learning on the Cloud

Nowadays, when most people think about the term “machine learning,” they think of advanced, refined applications such as Chat-GPT, the chatbot-based deep learning text generator, or AlphaGo, the computer program that’s currently the “world's best player” of the board game Go.

Common misconceptions behind cloud migration failures

Migrating your workloads to the cloud can bring some undeniable benefits to your organisation. For example, you can leverage cloud automation to significantly improve your time to market. You can also benefit from the ever increasing number of cloud regions to place your workloads close to your clients. This improves the response time of your services and, as a result, your customers’ satisfaction.

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How Hybrid Cloud Adoption Will Drive the Need for AIOps

Push came to shove with disruption and innovation during the pandemic. Enterprises started leveraging new technologies to gain competitive advantage, enter new markets, support employees from home and maintain business continuity. As a result, IT is faced with new challenges that are critical for realizing the value of the digital transformation that started and accelerated during the pandemic. To state the obvious, CIOs must manage an IT infrastructure that’s safe, sound and secure.

Control Plane is the most powerful environment for running multi-cloud & multi-region microservices

Control Plane is the most powerful environment for running microservices. Our patented technology harnesses the combined power of all the clouds, giving developers unprecedented power and flexibility. Founded in 2019, the Control Plane Platform was born out of the need to deliver unbreakable, auto-scaled, low-latency microservices. It is a virtual cloud made up of the three major cloud providers, harnessing all their power at a small fraction of the cost because workloads run serverless and cluster-less.

6 new features coming to ManageEngine CloudSpend in 2023

CloudSpend: Cloud cost management With the rising popularity of a hybrid cloud strategy, businesses need to keep their spending in check. To provide high availability for its data, more organizations have started to adopt a multi-cloud strategy, and they have choices for cloud platforms. AWS and Azure accounted for the lion’s share of the market in 2022. With their expertise in providing IaaS, this has also often resulted in disparate deployments with respect to cost estimation and control.

Using Azure Storage as a Backup Location: A Comprehensive Guide

Data is the lifeline of modern businesses, and losing it can have serious consequences. That’s why backup and recovery strategies are crucial for any organization. Azure Storage is one of the most reliable and secure cloud storage solutions available, making it an excellent option for storing backups. In this article, we will explore the benefits and challenges of using Azure Storage as a backup location and provide you with a step-by-step guide to set up and manage your backups.

The Cloud Monitoring Journey

Monitoring is not a goal, but a path. Depending on the maturity of your project, it can be labeled in one of these six steps of the cloud monitoring journey. You will find best practices for all of them and examine what companies get from each one. From classic virtual machines to large Kubernetes clusters or even serverless architectures, companies have adopted the cloud as a mainstream way to provide their online services.

Chargeback Vs. Showback: Here's What You Need To Know

One of the most challenging aspects of running a SaaS business is dealing with highly variable costs. Every service you provide needs resources, and the demands for those resources fluctuate. Just when you think you’ve got this quarter’s budget nailed down, an engineer makes a restructuring decision or a new feature launch exceeds expectations (or falls flat). Suddenly, your bill looks totally different than what you were expecting.

Tanzu Application Platform on AWS QuickStart: Now for Multicluster Deployments Too

The modular nature of VMware Tanzu Application Platform offers a customized environment for both developers and operators, bolstering their modernization efforts. In order to help customers reach their organizational goals, VMware continually works to refine the customer experience.

Deploy autoscaling self-hosted runners using AWS CDK

You can use CircleCI’s cloud resources to run your CI/CD jobs, but there may be times you want to run them on your infrastructure. If your team imposes privileged access and control requirements, a self-hosted infrastructure might be best for running your jobs. CircleCI’s self-hosted runners lets you do exactly that. It is easy to get started and start using self-hosted runners.

Simplify management across cloud platforms with OpenCP

Managing your clusters has become a complex and confusing task. With scattered tools and the requirement to learn specific tools from cloud providers, many companies have trouble making the most of the cloud. That's where OpenCP comes in. Join us as we explore the benefits of simplifying management across cloud platforms with OpenCP. We’ll dive into the benefits of using OpenCP, how it works, and how it is built on the best practices of kubectl and kubeapi.

Maximizing Uptime and Security: Best Practices for AWS and Azure IAAS

Cloud computing has become an essential tool for businesses looking to increase efficiency, reduce costs, and improve reliability. Among the most popular cloud providers, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure are two of the leading players in the industry. Both AWS and Azure offer Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions that allow businesses to host and manage virtual machines in the cloud.

Adopt open source securely from bare metal to cloud

It’s no secret that developers prefer to use open-source software in their projects. However, the Log4Shell attack or the more recent PyPl crypto miner packages have taught us that there are questions around how it should be managed. At Canonical we have been dealing with open-source security issues since the very first release of Ubuntu and way before the topic became number 1 on every CISO priority list. In this video, our team discusses how your company can manage these challenges and lay the software foundation of a successful cybersecurity program.

The Storage Supply Chain and Its Effect on Infrastructure Teams

For the past couple of years, no one has been able to escape the effects of supply chain problems throughout their personal and professional lives. According to our recent State of Hybrid Cloud Storage survey, storage and the IT equipment that supports storage systems were no exception, and disruptions created extra work and headaches for those teams.

4 Azure Load Balancer Metrics to Monitor

An Azure Load Balancer is a Layer-4 (TCP, UDP) load balancer that provides high availability by distributing incoming traffic among healthy VMs. A load balancer health probe monitors a given port on each VM and only distributes traffic to an operational VM. Azure Load Balancers are frequently used in Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) deployments. From our work with Azure Load Balancer, we think there are 4 key metrics and events you should proactively monitor and alert on.

Understanding Azure Storage Regions: A Comprehensive Guide

Azure Storage is a cloud-based storage solution that provides highly available, secure, scalable, and durable storage for your data. Azure Storage provides multiple types of storage options, including Blob storage, File storage, Queue storage, and Table storage. One of the critical factors in selecting Azure Storage is choosing the right region for your data. In this article, we’ll discuss Azure Storage Regions in detail and provide a comprehensive guide to help you make an informed decision.

Azure Storage Limits

As businesses increasingly rely on cloud storage solutions to store and manage their data, it’s essential to understand the limits of the storage options available to them. One popular cloud storage platform is Azure Storage, which offers a range of storage options including Blob storage, Queue storage, Table storage, and Virtual Machine disk storage.

What's new with AWS in 2023

Despite being the oldest and largest cloud vendor, market leader Amazon Web Services, known to all as AWS, is not immune to market trends. Despite a 20% year-on-year increase in fourth quarter revenue on 2022, growth was considerably slower than the preceding quarters, as companies of all sizes in all sectors reel in their tech spend.

The Importance of Automating Workloads in the Cloud

The adoption of cloud computing has seen a constant rise. Research estimates that the cloud has the potential to add USD 1 trillion of Economic Value by 2030. With this increase in cloud adoption, the need to scale faster in a more complex cloud ecosystem seems like the fate of every organization. For IT teams, the challenge is not any different! In a world where our needs can be fulfilled virtually from the comfort of our couches, Gone are the days of long wait times and doing something manually.

Why Unit Economics Helps You Commit To Discounting Programs

Is your enterprise still paying the sticker price for cloud services? If so, you’re probably leaving a significant amount of money on the table. Once your company surpasses the level of “large business” and begins growing into a full-fledged enterprise, it likely qualifies for enterprise discounts offered by each of the major cloud providers. The most well-known of these would be the Enterprise Discount Program (EDP) offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The Ultimate Planning Checklist for Migrating Azure VMs to VMware

Migrating virtual machines from Microsoft Azure to VMware can be a complex and time-consuming process. But with the right planning and preparation, it can be a smooth and stress-free transition. In this blog post, we will be providing you with a comprehensive planning checklist to help guide you through the process of migrating Azure VMs to VMware. And with Carbon – the automated migration software – you can simplify and streamline the process even further.

Why Migrate Azure VMs to VMware: The Benefits

As organizations transition to the cloud, they are faced with the question of which platform is best suited to their needs. While Microsoft Azure has been a popular choice for cloud computing, many organizations are finding that VMware is a better fit for their virtualized infrastructure needs. This article will explore the reasons why you should consider migrating your Azure VMs to VMware and the benefits that come with making this transition.

Exploring Azure Kubernetes Service and its monitoring capabilities

What is Azure Kubernetes Service? Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is a fully managed open-source container orchestration service offered by Azure. Provisioning, scaling, and upgrading resources can be done without causing downtime with Azure Kubernetes Service. Container orchestration in Kubernetes enables deployed application components to be isolated in distinct containers that can scale independently. A cluster made up of these containers functions as a microservices-based software product.

Cloud repatriation drivers

With the looming macroeconomic uncertainties that are affecting growth, companies are trying to control their costs by downsizing their staff and reducing their infrastructure costs. One way to reduce infrastructure costs is repatriating workloads from public clouds, which we refer to by “cloud repatriation”. According to a 2021 survey by 451 Research, 48% of respondents repatriated some of their workloads from cloud providers.

Maximize Your VMware Environment with Efficient Snapshot Management

Snapshots are an essential part of virtual machine management, as they provide a convenient way to preserve the state of virtual machines and revert to an earlier version if necessary. However, without proper management, snapshots can quickly become a problem, consuming storage space and impacting performance. This is where SnapShot Master comes in. SnapShot Master is a comprehensive solution for managing snapshots in your VMware environment.

Troubleshoot and monitor .NET application deployed in Azure!

Document360 is one of the leading knowledge base platforms in the market, with over 1000 enterprise customers. The initial version of Document360 was released in the year 2017. Due to the simple and elegant user experience and competitive feature set, it gained the traction of many customers in the market, leaving it to become one of the category’s top tools.

Azure Storage: Compare Prices and Plans - The Ultimate Guide

Azure Storage is a cloud-based storage solution offered by Microsoft. It provides scalable and secure storage for unstructured and structured data, including blobs, files, queues, and tables. With Azure Storage, you can store and access your data from anywhere in the world. The service is flexible and customizable, making it ideal for businesses of all sizes and industries. But, with so many plans and options available, it can be difficult to determine the best plan for your business needs.

50+ DevOps Interview Questions To Ask In 2023

Building quality software is tough. Even automation requires skilled developers to make it work. Yet, good developers are in short supply. You could offer attractive packages, too. Think: hybrid working, breakfast burritos, and organic chicken wings every Wednesday. You'll still need to ask the right DevOps interview questions to find and hire qualified DevOps engineers.

Data Gravity in Cloud Networks: Achieving Escape Velocity

In an ideal world, organizations can establish a single, citadel-like data center that accumulates data and hosts their applications and all associated services, all while enjoying a customer base that is also geographically close. As this data grows in mass and gravity, it’s okay because all the new services, applications, and customers will continue to be just as close to the data. This is the “have your cake and eat it too” scenario for a scaling business’s IT.

Goliath Technologies Launches Intelligent Cloud Monitoring Solution

Philadelphia, PA – February 8, 2023 –Goliath Technologies, a leader in end-user experience monitoring and troubleshooting software, has today announced the launch of Goliath Cloud Monitor – a new cloud monitoring platform that provides centralized monitoring of AWS and Azure cloud environments from a single location. With 75% of organizations worldwide implementing a multi-cloud strategy, the market demand for effective cloud monitoring solutions has never been greater.

How Are You Making Storage Placement Decisions-and Does It Matter?

According to Virtana’s recent State of Hybrid Cloud Storage survey, most organizations have a little over half of their storage in the cloud, keeping the rest on premises. But how are they deciding what storage goes where? Is there such a thing as a wrong—or even just sub-optimal—storage placement decision? We dug into the data to answer these questions.

Azure Storage Security: Keep Your Data Safe

In today’s digital world, data security is a top priority for businesses and individuals alike. With the increasing popularity of cloud computing, many organizations are relying on cloud storage services to store their sensitive information. Microsoft Azure Storage is one of the most popular cloud storage services, offering a range of storage solutions to meet the needs of different users.

Azure end-to-end transaction details with enhanced visibility

In this blog, we look at the importance of viewing Azure end-to-end transactions from the perspective of a business user, the overall benefit of Business Application Monitoring, and how Serverless360 BAM can help your organization by providing business insights in your Azure integration transactions.

Connecting OpenTelemetry to AWS Fargate

OpenTelemetry is an open-source observability framework that provides a vendor-neutral and language-agnostic way to collect and analyze telemetry data. This tutorial will show you how to integrate OpenTelemetry with Amazon AWS Fargate, a container orchestration service that allows you to run and scale containerized applications without managing the underlying infrastructure.

Ocean for Apache Spark: Now available to all Spot customers

As the size and frequency of data pipelines scale, organizations are constantly looking for ways to reduce costs and more efficiently utilize their data infrastructure. As the leading managed platform for Spark on Kubernetes, we’ve helped several customers make the decision to move their Spark workloads to Ocean for Apache Spark, taking advantage of strategic spot instance selection, flexible pod configurations, and resource utilization tools that can correct overprovisioning.

What You Don't Know About Azure Synapse

There are so many interesting and very useful Azure services out there. Over my time in the IT industry, I have seen the evolution of virtualization and eventually the cloud. It has been very interesting to follow the growth and evolution of Azure, and the introduction of Azure Synapse is a great example of how cloud services grow and evolve. Through using Azure, organizations can do things they never thought possible in the traditional data center.

Cycle Podcast | EP 17 | Nick Stinemates | Time at Docker/Rancher + Network Observability with Kentik

In this episode, Jake Warner chats with Nick Stinemates, VP of Business Development and Co-Chair of Labs at Kentik. Nick shares his experiences as an early team member at both Docker and Rancher and discusses Kentik's efforts to bring observability to networks for ISPs and large enterprises.

5 Real-Life Examples Of Companies Measuring Cloud Cost Per Customer

At CloudZero, we advocate measuring every cloud cost metric that makes the most sense for your business. When you know your company’s unit economics inside and out, you can better inform each department, show them how to make smart decisions based on the information, and ultimately maintain control over your margins. One of the most universally useful metrics to track is cloud cost per customer.

Install & Configure the AWS CLI | A Beginner's Guide

The AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) is a powerful tool that allows you to manage your AWS resources from the command line. Whether you are a developer, system administrator, or DevOps engineer, the AWS CLI can help you automate and streamline your workflows, increase productivity, and improve the security of your AWS infrastructure. In this article, we’ll cover the basics of installing and configuring the AWS CLI on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Azure File Shares: A Beginner's Guide

Azure File Shares is a cloud-based file sharing service that provides a secure, scalable, and highly available solution for storing and sharing files in the cloud. With Azure File Shares, you can store, share, and access files from anywhere, at any time, and from any device. Whether you’re a small business owner, a freelancer, or an enterprise-level organization, Azure File Shares can help you meet your file storage and sharing needs.

What are Azure Tables and what are they used for?

Azure Tables is a NoSQL cloud-based data storage service provided by Microsoft. It allows users to store and retrieve structured data in the cloud, and it is designed to be highly scalable and cost-effective. Azure Tables are used for a variety of purposes, including: In summary, Azure Tables are a cost-effective, highly scalable, and flexible data storage service that is well suited for storing large amounts of structured and semi-structured data.

What is the difference between Azure Data Lake storage Gen2 and Blob storage?

Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 and Blob storage are two cloud storage solutions offered by Microsoft Azure. While both solutions are designed to store and manage large amounts of data, there are several key differences between them. This article will explain the differences and help you choose the right solution for your cloud data management needs.

SRE Vs. DevOps: A Simple Breakdown Of The Differences

You know this already. Regardless of your size, you must keep up with technological developments in your industry — and, increasingly, in other industries, even those that seem unrelated. Embracing disruption can enable you to increase your market share, revenue, and profit margins. Delegating some development and operations responsibilities to Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) experts allows developers to innovate and create new solutions faster.

Digging Into the Recent Azure Outage

In the early hours of Wednesday, January 25, Microsoft’s public cloud suffered a major outage that disrupted their cloud-based services and popular applications such as Sharepoint, Teams, and Office 365. Microsoft has since blamed the outage on a flawed router command which took down a significant portion of the cloud’s connectivity beginning at 07:09 UTC.

Logic App Best practices, Tips, and Tricks: #20 Accessing Runtime Settings (Part II) - Logic App Standard

In my last blog post, I discussed How you could access runtime settings like the Subscription Id or the Resource Group in Logic App Consumption. I mentioned there that this differs from Consumption to Standard since they have different engines. So today, in this second part, we are going to address: How to access runtime settings inside Logic App Standard.

2023 focus: Boost Staff Productivity & Cut Costs

Today, COVID recommendations and protocols have changed, and businesses have quickly modified policies on hybrid and remote work, signaling yet another shift in how we do business. And as inflation has risen, investors and large corporations have taken a harder look at growth plans and how to deliver on them. Markets have tumbled and layoffs at technology companies are making headlines.

Apple iCloud Storage Plans and Pricing

Are you running out of iCloud storage and looking to upgrade it? Are you having a hard time choosing a pricing plan for it? iCloud is an easy way to store and backup every important document or photo you want to save. You can store files, images, docs, and pretty much anything else you can think of. With iCloud storage, you need to subscribe and choose the best plan for you accordingly.

What are VMWare Snapshots and when should you use them?

VMware snapshots are a feature of the VMware vSphere platform that allows administrators to create a point-in-time copy of a virtual machine’s disk for backup, testing, or other purposes. When a snapshot is taken, the current state of the virtual machine’s disk is saved and all future writes are directed to a new delta file.

Supporting Key Business Applications in the Cloud is Challenging: A Real-World Case Study

These days, many IT executives believe that it is easier to deploy applications in the cloud than on-prem. They are also often under the misconception that once an application is hosted in the cloud, it is the responsibility of the cloud service provider to maintain the availability and performance of the application.

Cluster orientation: The cost-availability sweet spot

When organizations deploy clusters — in, for example, Dev or Production environments — they may have different objectives around cost and availability. Dev clusters usually can tolerate more interruptions, as they are not running live services, but the expectation is saving money at the expense of availability.

Infrastructure metrics expanded to longer time frames

Understanding your systems’ status is essential for ensuring the reliability and stability of your applications and services. Without full awareness of what’s going on within your infrastructure, it can be difficult to manage solvable issues and to achieve reachable goals. Besides, it wouldn’t make much sense to run an app or service such as an e-store while ignoring what’s actually happening with it. How can you make any decisions that way?

GitHub Actions for Azure

This post was written by guest author, Nahla Davies. Nahla has been in the software space since 2010 and a technical writer since 2019. She previously served as a lead programmer at an Inc. 5,000 experiential branding organization whose clients include Samsung, Time Warner, Netflix, and Sony. Microsoft Azure is widely popular among developers and across organizations because it’s scalable, flexible, and customizable.

Synthetic Monitoring for Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) Applications

Synthetic Monitoring Platforms should be used for synthetic monitoring of AVD applications as they provide more complete and accurate results. These platforms are designed to work within virtualized environments and can interact with the underlying operating system, allowing for more in-depth testing and diagnosing performance issues.

Azure Blob Storage vs AWS S3: A Comprehensive Comparison

When it comes to cloud storage, two of the most popular options are Azure Blob Storage and Amazon S3. Both are highly scalable, secure, and widely used by businesses of all sizes. However, there are significant differences between the two that make them better suited for different use cases. In this article, we will take a detailed look at the features, capabilities, and pricing of Azure Blob Storage and Amazon S3 to help you decide which one is the best fit for your organization.

CloudHealth Vs. CloudCheckr (And Is There A Better Option?)

A big part of cloud management is managing and optimizing cloud costs. CloudHealth and CloudCheckr aim to help you manage the cost, performance, security, and compliance requirements of your cloud-based services. Both offer hybrid and multi-cloud deployment capabilities. But we doubt you'll want to use them both simultaneously. So, which one do you choose? CloudCheckr or CloudHealth? In this comparison, we reveal what makes each cloud management tool unique, so you can pick the right one for your needs.

The 4 Game-Changing Benefits of Migrating from Heroku to AWS

Hi there! If you're in the tech world, you've probably heard about the trend of companies moving from Heroku to AWS. At Qovery, we've seen an increasing demand from companies looking to make this move. And for good reasons! Here are the top 4 reasons why companies are choosing AWS over Heroku.