Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The 2019 AWS annual user conference, re:Invent, didn’t disappoint, with several intriguing announcements from the cloud giant. There was ample focus on Compute, with AWS Outposts and the new Graviton computing instances incorporating the ARM processing framework. There was also a renewed focus on AI and machine learning, as one would expect. Here’s my take on what this year’s show means for people working in IT operations and DevOps:

At re:Invent 2019, Farrah and I gave a talk on our paths into the tech industry, how serverless helped us both build some of our first products, and how serverless represents a new mindset. I’d wanted to share a version of that talk on our blog for those who couldn’t make it, though we hope to give it again in the near future.

We are happy to announce that Elastic Stack 7.5 brings support for the Azure Monitor service in Metricbeat and Azure activity logs and AD (Active Directory) activity reports in Filebeat.

Our December update includes a new role model for users in a SIGNL4 team, great new app features and integration with Azure Sentinel. Two default user roles are now available in each SIGNL4 team: Administrator and User. This allows for restricting standard user rights versus administrative access. For existing teams, all users are migrated to administrators, i.e. you should check this role assignment and downgrade some team members to users yourself if necessary.

Cloudtrail logs provide excellent insight into how your AWS account is being used. They record all activity by the web console, SDKs, and APIs. With help from the AWS plugin, getting this information into Graylog is easier than ever. In this blog post you'll set up the required AWS resources, configure the Graylog input, and do some basic searches to explore its capabilities.

A few weeks ago, Amazon announced a new feature for EBS snapshots: Amazon EBS Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR). Normally, accessing data on new EBS volumes was quite slow as the data is lazy-loaded from S3. When Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR) has been enabled on an EBS snapshot, new EBS volumes created from that snapshot will allow fast data access. While this feature is very good, it’s very expensive to keep enabled on an EBS snapshot for a long time.

John F. Kennedy described the journey into space as "...the most hazardous, and dangerous, and greatest adventure of which man has ever embarked." And that can sometimes feel like it applies to cloud asset management, too! While there are many analogies one can draw between space and the cloud, the idea of a vast, seemingly limitless, expanding area where new, ever stranger, things are discovered all the time seems quite apt.

API Gateway is a serverless service by AWS to expose cloud services through private or public HTTPs endpoints. It is used by many serverless teams to connect frontend applications to backend systems in a secure, scalable and seamless way. API Gateway integrates with Lambda, DynamoDB, S3 and a variety of other AWS services. The main issue with API Gateway, so far, was its cost. At $3.50 per million requests, it can be more expensive than Lambda itself.

We did a compilation of all announcements from the AWS re:Invent 2019 that are relevant for Serverless teams, broken down by services.