Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

September 2023

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3 Ways FinTechs Can Improve Cloud Observability at Scale

Financial technology (FinTech) companies today are shaping how consumers will save, spend, invest, and borrow in the economy of the future. But with that innovation comes a critical need for scalable cloud observability solutions that can support FinTech application performance, security, and compliance objectives through periods of exponential customer growth. In this blog, we explore why cloud observability is becoming increasingly vital for FinTech companies and three ways that FinTechs can improve cloud observability at scale.

What Is Tiered Pricing? 5 Tiered Pricing Examples

Pricing matters. Charge too little and you won't earn enough revenue to stay afloat. Charge too much and you could lose thousands in potential business. You don’t want to price out some customers. So what can you do? This is where tiered pricing comes into play. The SaaS pricing approach can be helpful for SaaS companies to meet the needs and budgets of each of their different customer personas.

The Future of Cloud Native Data is Now

Struggling with data complexities in distributed apps? Watch our webinar with Google Cloud and TechCrunch on mastering cloud-native data! Join Aiven’s Matty Stratton and Google’s Kaslin Fields, as they guide you through the steps to manage the data on your distributed applications. By leveraging data’s inherent gravity, it can be used across all components of your applications.

How to configure API Management to use Business Activity Monitoring?

Want to troubleshoot your Azure integration solutions faster and easier? In this video, we'll show you how to configure API Management to use Business Activity Monitoring from Serverless360. This will give you and your team of business and IT support users enhanced visibility into how your APIs are being used, and provide you with features like advanced monitoring, message reprocessing, and the ability to trace business transactions across your entire architecture.

How to optimize cost of Logic Apps Consumption?

Our latest video on Logic App consumption and cost optimization! Are you looking to develop interfaces at minimal expense but worried about the potential money drain from unnecessary polling and checks? In this video, we've got you covered! See how Serverless360's powerful Cost Analyzer can help you trim down expenses, especially in non-production environments. Say goodbye to wasted funds and hello to smarter Logic App management.

How do log analytics and Business Activity Monitoring differ for business users?

It is considerably difficult for Business users & support operators to understand a business architecture built using App Insights and Log Analytics, the amount of Azure knowledge is insufficient to monitor the business process. In this video, we will focus on a real-world scenario where you might be using Logic Apps and compare the differences between using Log Analytics diagnostics data and Serverless360 BAM.

Pepperdata Capacity Optimizer Next Gen: How Pepperdata Can Save 30% Off Your Cloud Bill

Pepperdata Capacity Optimizer Next Gen is the only cost optimization solution for both Apache Spark and microservices that can save you between 30–47% on your cloud bill. No matter if you try to manually tune your applications on your own, an estimated one-third of what is spent every day on cloud computing resources is wasted. While you might have cost-optimized your infrastructure with things like savings plans, spot and reserved instances, that doesn’t address the waste inherent in your applications.

How to operationalize FinOps to drive cloud and cost efficiency

For FinOps to truly deliver value for your organization, you need to look beyond what you spend in the cloud. Learn how to operationalize FinOps through continuous visibility, continuous cost and infrastructure optimization, and AI- and machine learning-driven automated optimization. Through this process, FinOps becomes fully ingrained in your cloud operations to ensure that your applications run on efficient, reliable and cost-effective cloud infrastructure.

2bcloud Named Microsoft Azure Expert Managed Services Provider for Four Consecutive Years

2bcloud announces it has maintained its elite status as a Microsoft Azure Expert Managed Services Provider (MSP). The Azure Expert MSP is the highest level of partner certification from Microsoft on Azure, and the partner status underlines 2bcloud's position as a leading Microsoft Azure partner.

How to get your security team on board with your cloud migration

To find out more about cloud migrations, the pitfalls that await the unwary, and what the security implications are, I recently sat down with Dustin Dorsey, Systems & Data Architect at Biobot Analytics, based in Cambridge, MA. In the first post in this series, we talked about cloud providers being responsible for security ‘of’ the cloud, while their clients are responsible for security ‘in’ the cloud.

Test Automation - A Key to Telco Cloud Adoption

While industry experts struggle to find consensus on the path to Telco Cloud, almost everyone agrees that automation will play an outsized role in helping network operators overcome the challenges they face in adopting and successfully deploying Telco Cloud. For many network operators, the very inefficient pace of their existing software upgrades is a key challenge they must address to migrate their network to a modern Telco Cloud.

Beyond savings: Overlooked aspects of container optimization

Managing container environments, such as Kubernetes data planes and ECS requires more than achieving cost savings. Yes, this is a vital component of optimizing your containers. But you also need to optimize for availability and usage, all while having a clear visualization of how your costs break down across compute, network, and storage.

DIY or managed suite: Choosing the right AWS container optimization solution

When it comes to choosing the right AWS container optimization solution, building a DIY suite of free optimizer tools may seem like a great idea, but will it provide everything you need? The hidden, total cost of ownership (TCO) for open-source tools can quickly build up, making it a less manageable option when compared to a third-party optimizer. Our helpful list of what you need to consider will help you decide which AWS container optimization solution is right for you: a DIY toolset or a managed suite.

Monitoring Amazon SageMaker with Datadog

Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed service that enables data scientists and engineers to easily build, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models. Whether you are integrating a personalized recommendation system into your video streaming application, creating a customer service chatbot, or building a predictive business analytics model, Amazon SageMaker’s robust feature set can simplify your ML workflows.

Defining Your Cloud Core Migration Strategy - Fail to Prepare, Prepare to Fail

In this enlightening panel discussion from the Telco Core Strategy Summit, industry experts discuss the intricacies of cloud core migration. Learn from seasoned professionals, including Kentik’s Justin Ryburn, as they share insights on cloud migration challenges, the importance of automation, and strategies to maintain security and performance. Understand the significance of detailed planning, the shifting dynamics of workloads in the cloud, and how to navigate the complexities of this transformative journey.

Serverless Microservices on Azure

Serverless Microservices combines both Serverless and Micro-Service Architectures, which gives the advantage of scalable Loosely coupled services without managing physical servers. In this episode of "Azure on Air" podcast, learn how serverless microservices in Azure offer reduced complexity, cost savings, and faster innovation. Discover Azure's core serverless service, Azure Functions, and other managed services that enable full-fledged serverless applications.

Microsoft Fabric Explained: All you need to know

What is Microsoft Fabric? Microsoft Fabric is an end-to-end analytics solution with full-service capabilities including data movement, data lakes, data engineering, data integration, data science, real-time analytics, and business intelligence—all backed by a shared platform providing robust data security, governance, and compliance.

Navigating Multi-Cloud Environments: Managing Deployments with Ease

Multi-cloud seems like an obvious path for most organizations, but what isn’t obvious is how to implement it, especially with a DevOps centric approach. For Cycle users, multi-cloud is just something they do. It’s a native part of the platform and a standardized experience that has led to 70+% of our users consuming infrastructure from more than 1 provider.

The importance of Azure cost to DevOps

Cloud computing’s ascent has redefined modern business operations. Azure, among other platforms, offers unparalleled scalability, speed, and resilience. However, this vast potential brings about the challenge of cost management. Although DevOps teams traditionally focus more on deployment and uptime, addressing Azure costs is essential. Here’s why.

2bcloud Named Microsoft Azure Expert Managed Services Provider for Four Consecutive Years

New York, September 27, 2023 – 2bcloud, a leading next-generation, multi-cloud managed service provider for tech companies on their cloud journey, today announced it has maintained its elite status as a Microsoft Azure Expert Managed Services Provider (MSP). The Azure Expert MSP is the highest level of partner certification from Microsoft on Azure, and the partner status underlines 2bcloud’s position as a leading Microsoft Azure partner.

Security in the cloud: Whose responsibility is it?

While the cloud is recognized as more secure than on-premises servers and infrastructures, it does come with the often talked about shared responsibility model. Cloud providers are responsible for security ‘of’ the cloud, while their clients are responsible for security ‘in’ the cloud. It’s ‘differently secure’, rather than the traditionally secure organizations have been used to when working with on-premises environments.

Reaping the Benefits of Multi-Cluster Orchestration in Kubernetes

The rise of containerization has precipitated an unprecedented shift in the software development landscape, with Kubernetes emerging as the de facto standard for managing large-scale containerized applications. One of the more nuanced aspects of Kubernetes that is gaining attention is multi-cluster orchestration. This approach to cluster management offers several compelling advantages that reshape how businesses operate and innovate in a cloud-native context.

Optimization Without Recommendations: Automating Your Cost Optimization on Amazon EKS

Learn how Pepperdata uses machine learning to provide Continuous Intelligent Tuning automatically to your Amazon EKS applications, helping your platform team recover wasted capacity and ultimately reduce your spend for cloud resources.

31 Crucial DevOps Automation Tools Your Team Needs In 2023

As technology advances and business environments become increasingly competitive, your DevOps team has to continuously improve your product. The challenge is to free up their time so that they can release new product features and improve existing ones. Automating repetitive tasks is one way to accomplish this. Manual approaches also tend to generate or miss errors, slow time to market, and fail to test and monitor system health quickly enough.

Coralogix vs Google Cloud Operations: Support, Pricing and Features

Google Cloud Operations, formerly known as Stackdriver, is relatively new to the observability space. That being said, its position in the GCP ecosystem makes the platform a serious contender. Let’s explore some of the key ways in which Google Cloud Operations differs from Coralogix, a strong full-stack observability platform and leader in providing in-stream log analysis for logs, metrics, tracing and security data.

Failing in the Cloud-How to Turn It Around

Success in the cloud continues to be elusive for many organizations. A recent Forbes article describes how financial services firms are struggling to succeed in the cloud, citing Accenture Research that found that only 40% of banks and less than half of insurers fully achieved their expected outcomes from migrating to cloud. Similarly, a 2022 KPMG Technology Survey found that 67% of organizations said they had failed to receive a return on investment in the cloud.

Clouds, caches and connection conundrums

We recently moved our infrastructure fully into Google Cloud. Most things went very smoothly, but there was one issue we came across last week that just wouldn’t stop cropping up. What follows is a tale of rabbit holes, red herrings, table flips and (eventually) a very satisfying smoking gun. Grab a cuppa, and strap in. Our journey starts, fittingly, with an incident getting declared... 💥🚨

The Limitations Of Combining CloudHealth And Kubecost

Ever since its release in September 2014, Kubernetes has been equally powerful and meme-able in the engineering world. For all the magic of its container orchestration and compute resource management, it’s also mysterious and, to many, confounding — especially when it comes time to pay for it. As we’ve written before, migrating to Kubernetes often means losing cost visibility.

Auto-Instrumenting OpenTelemetry for Kafka

Apache Kafka, born at LinkedIn in 2010, has revolutionized real-time data streaming and has become a staple in many enterprise architectures. As it facilitates seamless processing of vast data volumes in distributed ecosystems, the importance of visibility into its operations has risen substantially. In this blog, we’re setting our sights on the step-by-step deployment of a containerized Kafka cluster, accompanied by a Python application to validate its functionality. The cherry on top?

Run Azure Functions locally in Visual Studio 2022

Azure Functions offers a serverless solution that streamlines the development process, minimizes infrastructure overhead, and results in cost savings. The beauty of this approach is that you no longer need to grapple with server deployment and maintenance; the cloud infrastructure automatically furnishes the essential resources to support your applications.

Azure Event Grid dead letter monitoring

Microsoft Azure provides a completely managed event routing service called Azure Event Grid. It allows you to respond to events received from various Azure services and external applications and forward them to different Azure services and endpoints. Azure Event Grid provides a unified way to manage events in Azure with event-driven programming. With Event Grids, you can create event-driven applications in a serverless environment, cutting down costs and performance lags.

Monitor multiple Azure subscriptions in a single dashboard

Multiple Azure subscriptions are typically managed by a Tenant in an enterprise. Each subscription is tailored to a specific product, project, module, or environment. This article addresses the utilization of Serverless360 for the monitoring and managing these diverse Azure subscriptions.

How to host a multiple-application project on Platform.sh

We’re here to shed a little light on how you can host and configure your multi-app projects on Platform.sh with a step-by-step guide on how to set up a project on our platform. Enabling your team to focus more on creating incredible user experiences and less on multi-app infrastructure management. As well as a few multi-app development tips along the way. We’re going to look at this through the lens of a customer on the lookout for multi-application hosting with a few specific constraints.

Why Unit Cost Must Be Your North Star Metric In The Cloud

You’re a savvy SaaS business leader, so you already know the importance of keeping costs low to maximize your margins. What you might not have considered, however, is how tracking unit cost in your cloud spend data can help you achieve optimizations far beyond what you’d get with traditional cost-cutting methods. Keep reading to learn how cloud spend unit costs can drive savings you never knew were possible.

Azure SQL Database monitoring

Azure Database is a comprehensive cloud-based service Microsoft offers as part of its Azure cloud computing platform. It provides various database solutions to cater to different application needs, offering scalability, reliability, and performance. Here’s a quick look at Azure Database: Database Types: Azure Database supports various databases, including SQL databases, NoSQL databases, and data warehousing solutions.

SharePoint Admin Guide for Beginners

SharePoint is a Microsoft-owned platform that provides an extensive range of solutions for content management and collaboration within and outside an organization. Built on a web-based technology stack, it integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Office 365 and offers features like document libraries, team sites, intranets, extranets, and advanced search functionalities. It can be deployed both on-premises or in the cloud.

Unlocking Microsoft SharePoint

Before you dive into SharePoint, you may wonder, “Why do I need a technical guide?” The simple answer? To unlock SharePoint’s full potential. Understanding its nuts and bolts will empower you to customize it to your needs, optimize its functionality, and elevate your overall user experience. This article goes beyond the surface-level features to explain the underlying architecture, data storage mechanisms, and much more. Ready to unlock the mysteries of SharePoint? Buckle up!

Single-Tenant Vs. Multi-Tenant Cloud: When To Use Each

When operating in the cloud, one of the key decisions to make is about which type of architecture to adopt for your business and customer data. This is because choosing cost-effective architecture is key to building profitable SaaS software. Single-tenant and multi-tenant cloud environments are the options to consider. Both types of architecture have security and privacy implications. There’s also the issue of cost, which differs significantly depending on the architecting model you adopt.

Differences Between SharePoint On-Premise and SharePoint Online

So, you’re knee-deep in the world of Microsoft SharePoint, huh? If you’re an IT professional, you’re well aware that SharePoint is no longer just a “nice-to-have” but more of a “must-have.” You’ve got two flavors to choose from: SharePoint On-Premise and SharePoint Online. Which one is the right fit for your organization? Buckle up, because we’re about to dive deep into the nitty-gritty differences, pros, cons, and everything in between.

On-Premise vs Cloud Software: What's the Difference?

Since the early 2010s, software delivery methods have largely evolved. While on-premises tooling defined the first wave of customizable software, the market saturation of cloud-based counterparts offers new forms of software solutions. Navigating the complexities of on-prem, cloud, and hybrid setups demands a deep understanding of each offering’s efficiencies and requirements. Learn more about on-premise vs cloud software in our comparison below.

5 AWS Logging Tips and Best Practices

If you’re an Amazon Web Services (AWS) user, you’re probably familiar with some of Amazon’s native services available for logging and monitoring, such as CloudWatch and CloudTrail. With that said, log management can get complicated quickly, especially if you’re dealing with a high volume of logs from AWS Lambda functions or a multi-cloud/hybrid cloud environment.

Microsoft SharePoint: From Its Inception to Future Prospects

Hello, tech aficionados and IT professionals! If you’re in the business of managing digital assets, workflows, or intranets, chances are you’ve crossed paths with SharePoint. But do you ever wonder how this versatile platform has evolved over the years? Or perhaps you’re curious about what future enhancements are on the horizon? Well, buckle up, because we’re about to embark on a comprehensive journey through the fascinating world of SharePoint.

Microsoft Onedrive Review and the Best Alternatives for Your Cloud Storage Needs

As the cloud storage world expands, so does the competition for the crown of best online cloud storage provider, leaving many people wondering which is the best cloud storage option for them. In this case, it's time to put Microsoft OneDrive under the microscope in this OneDrive review.

How I cut my AKS cluster costs by 85%

Recently we announced the availability of a new version of Ocean for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). I decided to migrate some of our production services. While the service was already running on native AKS, we decided to leverage Spot’s Ocean for AKS to manage it more effectively, and, as they say, drink our own champagne. The outcome has been quite impressive. I managed to reduce our spending for this AKS cluster by a staggering 85%. You can see the results in the screen capture provided below.

Securing Open Source Dependencies on Public Cloud

Aaron Whitehouse, Senior Director of Public Cloud Enablement at Canonical, explains why you need to be thinking about open source dependencies in your software pipelines. He covers three main areas of software dependency management: ESM is part of Canonical's Ubuntu Pro offering and gives developers access to approximately 30,000 packages that they can build on, confident in the knowledge that Canonical will patch high and critical vulnerabilities for up to 10 years while preserving API stability -- regardless of the upstream project's support lifecycle.

CapEx Vs. OpEx In The Cloud: 10 Key Differences

As many companies shift from traditional IT infrastructure to cloud computing, they are also rethinking how they handle cloud costs — from accounting to tax reporting. Computing costs are predictable and relatively fixed in traditional IT environments. An organization purchases computing capacity upfront and uses it over time. The total cost of ownership is fairly easier to calculate with this setup. By contrast, cloud computing operates on a pay-as-you-go basis, with no upfront payments.

Azure Integration Automates Asset Discovery on Tidal Accelerator

We’re excited to share an update on our Microsoft Azure integration that automates discovery and mapping of key cloud assets into Tidal Accelerator. Tidal has enabled a new integration that pulls information on Azure Virtual Machines (VMs), Azure App Service, and Azure Database instances, Elastic Pools and Servers, directly into Tidal Accelerator for further analysis.

The Ultimate RDS Instance Types Guide: What You Need To Know

Amazon’s Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) offers a variety of database instances, which can be confusing at first. In this guide, we'll clarify what each RDS instance class, family, type, and size means in under 15 minutes. Let's start at the beginning.

Understanding Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS)

Hello, and welcome to this deep dive into one of the most underappreciated yet profoundly useful technologies in the Windows operating system—Volume Shadow Copy Service, commonly known as VSS. Have you ever been caught in a situation where your computer crashes, and you lose hours, days, or even weeks of work? It’s a heart-stopping moment that most of us have unfortunately experienced. But here’s where VSS comes into play.

Real-Time Cost Optimization: Application Level FinOps for Spark on Amazon EMR and Amazon EKS

Pepperdata’s ability to halve cloud costs at top enterprises may seem radical and new, but it’s absolutely not. Pepperdata has been hardened and battle tested since 2012, and our software is currently deployed on about 100,000 instances and nodes across some of the largest and most complex cloud deployments in the world. We’re an AWS ISV Accelerate partner focused on helping customers save money running Spark on Amazon EMR and Spark and microservices on Amazon EKS.

Is Bun the Next Big Thing for AWS Lambda? A Thorough Investigation

It’s been only a few days since the Bun 1.0 announcement and it’s taken social media by storm! And rightly so. Bun promises better performance, and Node.js compatibility and comes with batteries included. It comes with a transpiler, bundler, package manager and testing library. You no longer have to install 15 packages before writing a single code line. It creates a standardised set of tools and addresses the fractured nature of the Node.js ecosystem.

Cloud monitoring vs. On-premises - Prometheus and Grafana

Prometheus and Grafana are the two most groundbreaking open-source monitoring and analysis tools in the past decade. Ever since developers started combining these two, there's been nothing else that they've needed. There are many different ways a Prometheus and Grafana stack can be set up.

Unlocking Cloud Migration Excellence with a Vision Statement

A successful cloud migration begins with a well-defined vision of the desired outcomes and alignment to the organization’s strategic goals. At Tidal, we often work with customers to develop vision statements and success metrics that provide a North Star to guide the migration journey. Vision statements help balance tactical project objectives with the customer’s broader mission.

What Is Infrastructure as Code? How It Works, Best Practices, Tutorials

In the past, managing IT infrastructure was a hard job. System administrators had to manually manage and configure all of the hardware and software that was needed for the applications to run. However, in recent years, things have changed dramatically. Trends like cloud computing revolutionized—and improved—the way organizations design, develop, and maintain their IT infrastructure.

Solving Faster in the Cloud Hybrid Infrastructure Observability with Kentik

How can you quickly discover misconfigured security groups, access control lists, or routing tables? We explore how practitioners serving distributed teams or customer workloads can tighten up policies, impact costs, and unblock their colleagues with cloud infrastructure observability that starts with the network.

ECS Vs. EC2 Vs. S3 Vs. Lambda: The Ultimate Comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers over 200 fully-featured services. AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon Lambda, and the AWS Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) are some of the most critical services you should become familiar with. We’ve covered Amazon ECS vs. EKS vs. Fargate for managing and deploying containers before. In this guide, we'll explain how Amazon EC2, Lambda, ECS, and S3 compare and when you’ll want to use each.

Ep. 8: Building a Better Internet with John Engates

In this episode, Shon sits down with John Engates, Field CTO of Cloudflare, for an in-depth conversation that navigates the cutting-edge intersections of technology, privacy, and security. Dive into the backstory of Cloudflare's transformative 1.1.1.1 DNS service, which is redefining what it means to offer both speed and privacy in data transfer. Explore the early days of cloud computing with John's firsthand experience at Rackspace, and learn about the inception of OpenStack, the open-source cloud platform that has democratized understanding of cloud infrastructure.

How to resubmit & delete messages in Azure Service Bus dead letter queue?

Azure Service Bus is a cloud messaging service in Microsoft Azure that enables independent applications or services to communicate and exchange data through messages stored in queues or topics. This facilitates scalable and reliable communication in distributed systems. Service Bus contains two types of messaging entities queues, and topics. Queue: Queues transmit the messages in FIFO (First In, First Out) message delivery. Each message in a Queue can be received by only one active receiver.

Azure Monitoring Tool: Here's What's New in Serverless360 for August 2023

Serverless360's - latest updates bring you a streamlined approach to managing your business application intricacies. In this video, see how Serverless360 - an advanced Azure Monitoring Tool can streamline your business operations, making tasks like API monitoring and Power Automate flow management more efficient. But that's not all. The updates include fine-tuned enhancements like monthly calendar views and cost optimization recommendations that can help save your organization's valuable time and resources.

7 Strategies for Azure Cost Optimization

Struggling with Azure Cost Optimization? Tune into this insightful podcast with Twan Koot, a seasoned Microsoft Azure Cloud architect at Ordina, as he discusses strategies to help you achieve optimal Azure savings. Learn how to reduce Azure expenses and scale efficiently, along with the essential techniques for maximum cloud savings.

Auto Filter Messages into Subscriptions in Azure Service Bus Topic

Topic is a logical channel to which publishers send messages. Topics can be employed when several subscribers wish to subscribe to a specific set of messages. Messages sent to a topic are then forwarded to its associated Subscriptions.

AWS Savings Plans Vs. Reserved Instances: When To Use Each

A decade after launching Reserved Instances (RIs), Amazon Web Services (AWS) introduced Savings Plans as a more flexible alternative to RIs. AWS Savings Plans are not meant to replace Reserved Instances; they are complementary. SPs and RIs have some significant differences that make each better suited to specific uses. As an example, while Savings Plans are applicable to both EC2 and Fargate instances, RIs are only applicable to EC2 instances. This guide will cover.

Amazon RDS: managed database vs. database self-management

Amazon RDS or Relational Database Service is a collection of managed services offered by Amazon Web Services that simplify the processing of setting up, operating, and scaling relational databases on the AWS cloud. It is a fully managed service that provides highly scalable, cost-effective, and efficient database deployment.

Deploy fully configured VMs in minutes on Google Cloud, using gcloud CLI and cloud-init

Every public cloud provider has a templating mechanism to deploy fully configured applications. For anyone interested in a vendor-neutral approach that works on major public clouds, cloud-init offers a good solution. Cloud-init makes your work re-usable regardless of the clouds you deploy to. It’s an open source configuration automation solution for Linux, which performs steps at various stages of a single machine’s boot up.

Seven Models of Cloud Native Applications

In today's cloud-driven landscape, organizations are transitioning from legacy monolithic systems to agile, scalable, and secure cloud-native solutions. Some are even forging new cloud-native applications. However, the concept of cloud-native design remains subjective, lacking a universal blueprint. This blog aims to provide clarity and guidance for designing precise cloud-native applications and container deployment.

K3s Vs K8s: What's The Difference? (And When To Use Each)

Kubernetes, or K8s, is an open-source, portable, and scalable container orchestration platform. With K8s, you can reliably manage distributed systems for your applications, enabling declarative configuration and automatic deployment. Yet, K8s can be resource-intensive and costly, with a rather steep learning curve. But in 2019, a lighter, faster, and potentially more cost-effective alternative appeared: K3s. Still, K3s is not a magic wand that works for all Kubernetes deployments.

Real-time Ubuntu is now available in AWS Marketplace

Austin, TX, 12 September 2023: Canonical is thrilled to announce the listing of Ubuntu Pro 22.04 LTS with real-time kernel in AWS Marketplace, a digital catalog with thousands of software listings from independent software vendors that make it easy to find, test, buy, and deploy software that runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Cloud Efficiency Rate: A New Metric To Quantify Cloud-Native Business Value

In the last couple years, the SaaS world has undergone a paradigm shift with regard to cloud spending. As macroeconomic conditions shift from “peachy” to “moldy,” as SaaS grows increasingly crowded, as company valuations face new pressure, and as venture funding cools down, companies are looking to reduce — or in industry jargon, “optimize” — their cloud spending as much as possible, as soon as possible.

What is a PaaS? A Definitive Guide

A platform as a service, or PaaS, is one of the three major cloud computing service models. In our opinion, it’s the only one that successfully delivers all benefits of the cloud to software developers, including control, cost-effectiveness, flexibility, and scalability. Of course, other as-a-service models are still useful. In fact, all three main cloud computing models offer different advantages to organizations.

Understanding App Hosting: Definition and Functionality

Developing apps takes a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. It can feel like a marathon that doesn’t even have the courtesy to end once you cross the finish line. From managing infrastructure to scaling, operations, and security (to name just a few things), it takes plenty of work to ensure that your cherished creation is loved by users and customers. App hosting takes much of this responsibility off your shoulders, and a solid Platform as a Service (PaaS) provider can go even further.

Cloud data control: Introducing the OpenTelemetry Arrow Project

In collaboration with F5, ServiceNow® Cloud Observability is pleased to announce the availability of the OpenTelemetry Arrow Project. This co-donated and co-developed project gives organizations greater control over the data extracted from their cloud applications—as well as a path forward to improve the return on investment (ROI) of that data.

Microsoft OneDrive: Your Ultimate Guide to Cloud Storage

Hey there, cloud wanderer! Ever found yourself juggling multiple USB drives or emailing files to yourself just to have access to them on another device? Well, Microsoft OneDrive is here to make your life a whole lot easier. This article will be your ultimate guide to understanding what OneDrive is, how to use it, and why it might just be the cloud storage solution you’ve been looking for.

Custom domains now available on preview environments

You’re probably all very familiar with the URLs we currently generate automatically for your environments on Platform.sh by now. And while they are very useful, they’re not the most friendly-looking as, we build them using the following pattern: This approach is important because it ensures that our URLs are unique for all projects and their environments but it also makes them pretty long, overly complicated, and let’s face it—not the prettiest. But this is the case no more!

A detailed guide on Azure architecture diagram

Azure architecture diagrams are visual representations that illustrate the structure, components, and relationships of a solution or application deployed on Microsoft Azure. These diagrams provide a clear and concise overview of the various Azure resources and services used in a specific architecture. They are helpful for design discussions, documentation, and communication among team members and stakeholders.

JFrog's cloud migration story

Since inception in 2008, JFrog has hosted its own development environments on-prem. While this approach worked well for a time, the increasing need to deploy faster, while sustaining high quality and reducing hosting costs made us realize that we needed to leverage the JFrog SaaS Production environment. So in 2022, we started an effort to migrate our RnD environments from an on-prem solution to JFrog SaaS Production.

How to Integrate CloudWatch and Sentry with MetricFire

CloudWatch and Sentry are two powerful tools that play crucial roles in monitoring and error tracking, making them essential for any organization that wants to ensure the smooth operation of its applications and systems. CloudWatch, developed by Amazon Web Services (AWS), offers comprehensive monitoring capabilities for AWS resources and applications, providing real-time insights into system performance and resource utilization.

How to monitor power automate flows involving Azure services?

It can be challenging when you have to monitor and manage an integration solution from two different platforms like Azure service and Power Automate Flows. Michael Stephenson showcases Serverless360’s newest feature from Business Application on managing Power Automate and monitoring solutions across the Azure services.

Testing, Observing, and Debugging RabbitMQ

RabbitMQ is a popular open-source message broker that facilitates communication between different components of a distributed system. Monitoring a RabbitMQ instance is crucial to ensure its health, performance, and reliability. Monitoring allows you to identify and address potential issues before they escalate, ensuring smooth communication between various parts of your application.

Helios Joins the AWS Marketplace!

We are thrilled to announce that Helios, the applied observability platform for developers, is now available on the AWS Marketplace! This marks a significant milestone in providing visibility and runtime insights for easy troubleshooting and reduced MTTR. This further cements our commitment to providing top-tier services to our customers and to AWS users. By bringing Helios directly to the AWS Marketplace, it is easier than ever to access and onboard our platform.

Amazon ECS Vs. EKS Vs. Fargate: The Complete Comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides more than 200 services. Among those, Amazon Elastic Compute Service (ECS), Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and AWS Fargate help deploy and manage containers. Choosing between these services can be challenging. They seem similar on the surface (and are all popular). But each offers unique benefits and limitations. In this guide, we compare the three services, discussing the best use cases for each, and helping you choose the best fit for your business.

Azure SQL database cost optimization to maximize savings

Azure SQL is a versatile and powerful database service, and it is an increasingly popular choice for storing and managing application data due to its scalability, high availability, security, and simplicity of integration. A common demand for cloud workloads is cost optimization. To maximize cloud savings, this article discusses Azure SQL Database Cost Optimization.

Using cloud unit metric costs to right size your AWS bill and improve productivity

Uncertainty continues to plague global economies, prompting many CFOs to optimize their bottom lines by re-examining large line-item costs, payrolls, and unit economics. Many IT leaders have been directed by their C-Suite to reduce or halt cloud spending, which represents roughly 30% of IT budgets.

Exploring Kubernetes 1.28 Sidecar Containers

Kubernetes v1.28 comes with multiple new enhancements this year and we’ve already covered an overview of those in our previous blog, Do check this out before diving into sidecar containers. We’re going to completely focus on the new sidecar feature for this post, which enables restartable init containers and is available in alpha in Kubernetes 1.28.

Do you have a Cloud Exit Strategy?

In the modern digital age, the allure of cloud computing has been nothing short of mesmerizing. From startups to global enterprises, businesses have been swiftly drawn to the promise of scalability, flexibility, and the potential for reduced capital expenditure that cloud platforms like Azure offer. Considering the diverse Azure VM types and the attractive Azure VMs sizes, it’s easy to understand the appeal.

Skiff Competition: Discover a Cost-Effective and Secure Alternative to Skiff

Skiff is a cloud storage platform with the same goal as many alternative cloud storage services: to provide a secure and private cloud for individuals and businesses. Skiff hopes to provide alternatives to Big Tech companies such as Google Drive and Dropbox to give users full ownership of their files with end-to-end encrypted services. As well as cloud storage, Skiff has expanded its services to other products that encrypt your data, including email, calendar, and other mobile apps.

Leverage user context to debug mobile performance issues with the Instabug Datadog Marketplace offering

As user expectations for mobile apps increase, effective bug remediation involves not only addressing critical incidents as they occur but also proactively handling smaller performance issues in order to ensure a smooth user experience (UX). Instabug helps you understand how users experience your app with crucial mobile performance metrics—such as launch metrics, loading times, and UI hangs—viewable alongside your bug reports.

What is a virtual private cloud in AWS?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) dominates the cloud computing industry with over 200 services, including AI and SaaS. In fact, according to Statista, AWS accounted for 32% of cloud spending in Q3 2022, surpassing the combined spending on Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and other providers. A virtual private cloud (VPC) is one of AWS‘ most popular solutions. It offers a secure private virtual cloud that you can customize to meet your specific virtualization needs.

Azure Active Directory vs Active Directory: What's the Difference?

There are many possible reasons why you may want to know the difference between Active Directory and Azure AD. Maybe you've just migrated from Microsoft Office to Office 365. You might be moving on-prem virtual machines into Azure. Or perhaps you're developing a greenfield cloud-native app that won't be connected to your on-prem resources at all.

Simplify Azure Monitoring with Logz.io's New Azure-Native Integration

If you’re looking to monitor Microsoft Azure infrastructure with Logz.io, we’re now making it easier than ever with our new Azure-native integration Typically, collecting infrastructure metrics from Azure involves installing and configuring data collection components on your system, such as Prometheus, Telegraph, or a number of proprietary agents that are specific to different vendors.

6 Tips For People Looking To Upgrade Their Business To The Cloud

Are you looking to upgrade your business operations and take advantage of the convenience and scalability that cloud computing offers? With the right plan, moving your data and applications to the cloud can give you unprecedented access, a higher degree of control over security features, and an enhanced networking capability that other platforms can't match. In this blog post, we're going to look at six tips for people who are ready to make the jump into cloud technology. Learn about how properly preparing for such a major transition will help ensure success further down the line as well!

Azure Key Vault: A Comprehensive Overview

Azure Key Vault is Microsoft’s dedicated cloud service, designed to safeguard cryptographic keys, application secrets, and other sensitive data. In an era where digital security is paramount, it functions as a centralized repository. Here, sensitive data is encrypted, ensuring that only designated applications or users can access them. Imagine having a hyper-secure, digital vault where you can store all your essential digital assets.

The Benefits and Challenges of Managing Hybrid Estates

More and more organizations are migrating their data to the cloud but the majority are likely to end up managing hybrid estates, with some data managed through a cloud provider and some managed locally. This leads to some unique issues, especially around monitoring and services. If the objective of migrating to the cloud is simply to implement virtual machines (VMs) in a different location than you traditionally do, there will be fewer challenges.

FinOps Focus: Cost Management vs. Cost Optimization

Rethinking Cost Optimization Cost Optimization is a term that has been around for a while when discussing Cloud cost, and to a larger extent the practice of FinOps. It is usually what most people associate with FinOps when they hear those terms initially, but is that the correct term to use?

Cloud storage for enterprises

Any data-centric organisation faces the prospect of data growth at some point in their existence; it is estimated that more than 2,500 Petabytes (PB) of new data is created every day. While only a few organisations will ever have to deal with that kind of scale, it is important to plan ahead for your own organisation’s growth. Legacy appliance-based storage systems where hardware and software are closely coupled can be expensive to maintain, expand, and difficult to operate.

Cloud repatriation: What's behind the return to on-premises?

Find out why cloud repatriation is on the rise — and what makes on-premises the ideal approach for some businesses. Over the last ten years, the cloud has been touted as a game-changer. But, like magpies, have we all jumped on the “shiny object syndrome” bandwagon? Spending on public cloud services continues to show strong growth, with Gartner forecasting that by the end of 2023, worldwide end user spending on public cloud services will total nearly $600 billion.

How To Monitor AWS EC2 With MetricFire

AWS EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) has revolutionized the way businesses operate in the cloud. With its scalable and flexible infrastructure, EC2 allows organizations to easily deploy virtual servers and manage their computing resources efficiently. However, as your EC2 environment grows, monitoring becomes crucial to ensure optimal performance, security, and cost optimization. One powerful solution for monitoring AWS EC2 is Hosted Graphite by MetricFire, a comprehensive graphing and monitoring service.

Azure Event Hub logging, monitoring and alerting

Here is a blog about Azure Event Hubs monitoring and how Serverless360 helps you do it. Azure Event Hub is an event collection service and big data streaming platform. It is highly scalable and can handle millions of events per second. Azure Event Hubs are simple, secure real-time data and instantly connect millions of devices across platforms.

What Is AWS EMR? Here's Everything You Need To Know

According to Statista, the mass volume of data created, stored, copied, and consumed in 2020 was over 64 zettabytes (ZB), or about 64 trillion gigabytes (GB). This is expected to rise to 181 ZB by the year 2025. A large portion of this data is likely to be significant to your business. It can provide you with new insights that help you improve your product, communicate with consumers, and perform risk analysis. However, you’ll need the right tools to extract, sort, process, and analyze it.

31+ Must-Have ETL Tools In 2023

The most successful brands are data-driven. Whether it's Google, Amazon, or TikTok, they all use data to inform their next moves. But here's the thing. It's easy to collect a lot of data. Making sense of all that data is often the most challenging part. You can do that in three ways. Scripting is one option. Here, your developers code custom data integration tools in Python and Java alongside technologies like Hadoop and Spark.

Using Azure Policy to Enforce Storage Account Compliance

Ever had a migraine thinking about how to ensure compliance for your Azure Storage Accounts? You’re not alone. Companies worldwide struggle to maintain consistency, especially when it comes to cloud storage. That’s where Azure Policy comes into play. This article is a comprehensive guide that will walk you through everything you need to know about using Azure Policy to enforce compliance on your Azure Storage Accounts.

Top 8 things you should know about deploying RabbitMQ

RabbitMQ is a household name in the world of application development and system architecture. Acting as a middleman for communication, it seamlessly bridges the gap between various application components. If you’ve been contemplating the integration of RabbitMQ into your infrastructure or simply want to better understand its functionalities, this blog post is for you. Here are the top 8 things to know.

Azure: The Ultimate Guide to Microsoft's Cloud Computing Platform

Cloud computing has revolutionized the way businesses operate and manage their data. With the vast amounts of information being generated daily, traditional on-premises infrastructure struggles to keep up with the demands of scalability, security, and cost-effectiveness. This is where Azure, Microsoft's cloud computing platform, comes into play. Azure provides a comprehensive set of tools and services that enable organizations to build, deploy, and manage applications and services on a global scale.

Tutorial: Collecting Logs From Azure Block Blob Storage Account

Sumo Logic’s Azure Block Blob Storage solution provides an event-based pipeline for shipping monitoring data to Sumo Logic. This tutorial describes the Azure-Sumo event-based pipeline along with its components, and elaborates the data flow in the pipeline. The video also explains the Azure Resource Management (ARM) template that is used to build most of the components in the pipeline.

Cloud Cost Dashboards: What "A Single Pane Of Glass" Really Means

If you’ve done any shopping around for a cloud cost intelligence platform, you may have heard about the “single pane of glass” approach to presenting cloud cost data. It’s a descriptive phrase uttered by almost every cloud cost company in one form or another. We may not all say it in a similar way, but it’s the same concept across the board.

Learn about LogicMonitor's new launch approach

Check out this on-demand webinar with LogicMonitor’s Chief Product Officer, Taggart Matthiesen, and LogicMonitor’s Senior Director of Product Marketing, Bill Emmett, for a conversation about how our recent product innovations can help you unlock intelligence and extensibility in your hybrid IT environments.

Troubleshooting Hyper-V

In the ever-evolving landscape of IT, virtualization has established itself as an irreplaceable cornerstone. While various platforms offer virtualization services, Microsoft’s Hyper-V stands out as a robust, scalable, and user-friendly option. If you’re an IT professional, chances are you’ve come across Hyper-V at some point in your career. With its intricate features and multi-faceted architecture, Hyper-V serves as the backbone for many virtualized environments.

Understanding Zero Trust Principles

Have you ever wondered how to keep your digital assets truly secure in a world where cyber threats seem to evolve quicker than cybersecurity measures? If so, you might want to consider adopting a Zero Trust security model. Far from being a buzzword, Zero Trust has emerged as a holistic approach to cybersecurity that operates on a straightforward principle: “Never Trust, Always Verify”.

Coralogix Logging vs GCP Logging: Features, Pricing and Support

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) offers a wide range of features to support their core deliverable, highly available and scalable infrastructure-as-a-service. One of the features—GCP’s log management and available via GCP Log Explorer— is offered to support customers’ basic logging requirements.

When to scale tasks on AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS)

Since its inception, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) has emerged as a strong choice for developers aiming to efficiently deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications on AWS cloud. By abstracting the complexities associated with container orchestration, ECS allows teams to focus on application development, while handling the underlying infrastructure, load balancing, and service discovery requirements.

Hyper-V PowerShell Commands: A System Administrator's Guide

Hyper-V has rapidly become an indispensable tool in the system administrator’s toolkit. Not only does it provide a robust, feature-rich platform for virtualization, but it also seamlessly integrates with Windows Server, making it a must-have for any Windows-based enterprise environment. As a system administrator, you’ve probably realized that managing Hyper-V manually through its GUI can be time-consuming.

The Foundation of Cloud Optimization - Cloud Tagging Strategy

Cloud Tagging should be automated, not left to humans. Optimization in the cloud is actually really simple. Here’s how we get our customers thinking differently which in turn makes them successful. “To your developers the cloud is like a candy store is to a kid where all the candy is free”. Just as parents need to teach their kids the value of money, you need to teach your developers the value of cloud spend.

Building Organizational Trust for Cloud Optimization Software

You’ve loaded data into Densify and after reviewing recommendations your developers don’t want to take the recommended action – they aren’t trusting, yet. This is one of the top issues identified by the FinOps Foundation and many of our customers of Densify – but not all. Let’s explore what some customers do differently to build organizational trust in taking optimization recommendations.

Heroku Monitoring: Best Practices

When you immerse yourself in the world of application development, you'll find that deploying applications on Heroku comes with a certain level of ease. However, monitoring becomes a non-negotiable element to keep these applications running at their best. It's like having a clear aerial view of your application's performance - it helps you spot potential performance hurdles and handle issues proactively.

Megaport LIVE: Introducing Multicloud Connectivity | Webinar

Megaport LIVE: Introducing Multicloud Connectivity Recorded: 24 August 2023 Speakers: David Sloan - Solutions Architect In this webinar, Megaport Solutions Architect David Sloan breaks down how Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud structure their private direct connectivity offerings for multicloud.