Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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

By now you’ve probably gotten the message – multi-cloud DevOps (or a hybrid on-prem/cloud approach) is the future of development and deployment architectures. The benefits of this approach are pretty clear: future proofing your business, optimizing for performance and availability, avoiding vendor lock-in, leveraging the best tools/elements of each cloud provider, and more.

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

Cloud costs are a daily concern for companies running applications on Amazon Web Services (AWS). This makes sense because many organizations struggle with unexpected AWS charges. Although many organizations have a cloud budget in place, accurately controlling costs is difficult. Real-time cost remediation is often difficult for many, leading to inflated AWS costs every billing cycle. No matter where you are on your cloud journey, reducing AWS costs is something you’ll want to do continuously.

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

Containers are superior to Virtual Machines (VM) in many aspects, including the benefits of being lightweight, easily scalable, highly portable, etc. AWS provides two primary container services i.e., Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). Although both ECS and EKS are growing in popularity but achieving security while using these services is relatively a new topic.

For many organisations, multi-cloud has become or is becoming inevitable. After all, it’s unlikely there is a single cloud out there that is able to support all your requirements. More than likely however, is the chance that your business is becoming multi-cloud by stealth. Organisations typically use several, to dozens, to hundreds of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products, as well as a handful of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) hosting services, and development Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS).

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