Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

This post originally appeared on The New Stack and is re-published here with permission. In our technology-driven business climate, most companies have at least some, if not all, workloads on the cloud. And unlike on-premises networks, these cloud environments lack secure outer perimeters and specific off times. Cloud networks are always on and always available. While convenient, this also means hackers can access them at any time.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers. Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment.

Every year, the PHP foundation releases a new version of PHP that includes updated features for users. These new releases offer a sweet way to kick off every holiday season for developers and application makers (like me). Just days after its official release, we made PHP 8.1 available for all projects on our Grid plans. Now, you can take advantage of the long-awaited PHP 8.1 features on Upsun.

In collaboration with the AWS team, we have recently released the new Redshift data source plugin for Grafana. Amazon Redshift is the fastest and most widely used cloud data warehouse. It uses SQL to analyze structured and semi-structured data across data warehouses, operational databases, and data lakes by using AWS-designed hardware and machine learning.

On Nov. 8, I started as the new Chief Information and Security Officer at Grafana Labs. In my first five weeks, I’ve met about 100 really amazing people; learned and absorbed early lessons about our workplace culture; kicked off working groups for our 2022 initiatives (bug bounty FTW); and contributed to tackling our first-ever 0day. Amid all of that, I’ve also been doing a lot of thinking.

Building serverless applications on the “edge” is becoming a reality. The promise of fast execution and seamless deployment is near, but is it here? The goal: Use an edge platform to build a proof of concept clone of linkz.ai, a tooltip generator for external links (among other things).

Identifying the best payment plan for cloud services can be a challenge. For one thing, no two businesses are exactly alike. Since each organization faces a unique set of circumstances, it is tough to choose the best option from all the different cloud cost models without taking an in-depth look at business-specific aspects such as demand, spending preferences, and projected revenue over the next few years. On top of that, the payment plans themselves are very often confusing.

Did you get all the serverless updates from AWS pre- & re:Invent 2021?️ If you’re a serverless enthusiast we’ve collected the most important serverless updates from re:Invent 2021 you need to know about.

If IT Financial Management (ITFM) was as simple as widely presumed, we’d be seeing IT expenditure dropping globally with the continued adoption of cloud services. For example, in 2020 it was expected that 83% of enterprise workloads would move to the cloud. That move happened but the results didn’t come with the extensive cost reduction benefits that businesses envisioned. Organizations are actually spending more despite the workload migration.