Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In an earlier blog, we had discussed what is Microsoft Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) and why it is gaining popularity. In this blog, we present various community and vendor resources that can help you choose the right Azure instances for your Microsoft WVD deployment. Here, at eG Innovations, we offer a wealth of monitoring and simulation tools to allow you to monitor what real users are experiencing when accessing Microsoft WVD.

One of the most important things SaaS companies need to think about in order to be successful is financial modeling. To succeed in the increasingly competitive SaaS space, finance teams need to carefully consider a wide variety of KPIs and find ways to effectively manage both present and future cash flows. Cash flows and liquidity are two of the most common challenges faced in this industry — if effectively addressed, your company can position itself for long-term success.

Today, much of our online world is powered by cloud computing, and Amazon Web Services offers an amazing depth and breadth of available services. However, most of the time it starts with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2. EC2 is powered by virtual servers called instances and allows users to provision scalable compute capacity as desired. This means no server hardware investment and the ability to scale up or down in response to demand (thus elastic).

Detecting when an unauthorized third party is accessing your AWS account is critical to ensuring your account remains secure. For example, an attacker may have gained access to your environment and created a backdoor to maintain persistence within your environment. Another common (and more frequent) type of unauthorized access can happen when a developer sets up a third-party tool and grants it access to your account to monitor your infrastructure for operations or optimize your bill.

Towards the end of 2016, it all started with developing a simple platform to manage Microsoft Azure Service Bus namespaces. The then classic Azure portal had limited capabilities to manage Azure Messaging resources like Service Bus Queues and Topics. Paolo Salvatori developed and managed a community tool called Service Bus Explorer. We identified that there are some challenges or limitations in managing and monitoring Azure Messaging resources using the above two.

Security operations is now a critical business function tasked with securing digital transformation initiatives, to effectively mitigate evolving attacks and expanding attack surfaces, handle complexity and tool proliferation while teams are continuing to be virtual and distributed.

Recently, Amazon AWS introduced the new feature EC2 Serial Console for instances using Nitro System. It provides a simple and secure way to perform troubleshooting by establishing a connection to the serial port of an instance. Even though this feature is useful in case of break glass situations, from a security perspective, it could be used by adversaries to gain access through an unguarded secondary entrance.

In this tutorial, I will show you how to build and deploy a Jekyll static site to AWS S3 + Cloudfront using GitHub Actions. At PagerTree we use GitHub Actions to automate the building and deploying of our marketing site pagertree.com. These days, if you have to do anything manually more than a couple of times, you should probably be automating it. GitHub Actions make it easy to automate software workflows.