Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) provides block storage for applications that are running in the cloud. However, not every company is getting the most out of the EBS volumes they are using. Some companies can pay too much for EBS volumes without utilizing the allocated storage and IOPS. Other organizations may pay high prices because they are using the wrong disk type for their needs. This article explains five techniques you can use to optimize the performance of your EBS workloads.

Deploying and monitoring performance for an entire Kubernetes cluster can be complex. To simplify the process, we’ve added service discovery functionality to eliminate complex configuration, in addition to more advanced monitoring for viewing activity inside containers. Service discovery identifies k8s pods running on a cluster and immediately starts monitoring system performance. All containers are identified, regardless of complexity.

It’s no secret that AWS Lambda adoption has grown steadily since AWS first released it in 2015—and for good reason. The benefits of adopting Lambda are many: leveraging Lambda eliminates the need to provision and manage servers, enabling teams to just focus on their code without the mental and operational overhead of worrying about the underlying infrastructure.

Large-scale cloud applications are usually built using interconnected services that can be rather hard to troubleshoot. When a service is scaled, simple logging doesn’t cut it anymore and a more in-depth view into system’s flow is required. That’s where distributed tracing comes into play; it allows developers and SREs to get a detailed view of a request as it travels through the system of services.

PHP is one of the most popular programming languages on the web. It powers many widely used content management systems like WordPress and Drupal, and provides the backbone for modern server-side frameworks like Laravel and Symfony. Despite its popularity, PHP has a bit of a reputation for being slow and hard to maintain. It has gotten better in recent years, but there are two features that high-performance PHP applications will likely need: OPcache and PHP FastCGI Process Manager (PHP-FPM).

Editor's note: This blog post was originally published on relay.sh. Today we announce Relay, an event-driven automation platform. Sign up now and try it out! Relay connects infrastructure and operations platforms, APIs, and tools together into a cohesive, easy-to-automate whole. Relay is simple enough for you to start automating common, if-this-then-that (IFTTT) style DevOps tasks in minutes and powerful enough to model multi-step, branching, parallelized DevOps processes when the need arises.