Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Cloudflare, a company that provides CDN services to major websites around the world, recently experienced an outage that took down many of their customers’ sites. The outage began around 7AM EST, and many major companies, including web hosting company WP Engine and chat service Discord also experienced outages due to issues over at Cloudflare. Cloudflare has identified the source of the problem and implemented a temporary fix until the issues can be resolved permanently.

API Gateway is a powerful tool for creating a coherent API out of a set of multiple disconnected remote function providers, and API Gateway with AWS Lambda, when used properly, can give you the capacity to create truly powerful serverless APIs. However, given that API Gateway is a layer between your requests and the code itself, there are latency concerns that API Gateway Lambdas may face that may not be present when working with other architectures.

Reliability and user experience are no longer just “nice to have” features. Many companies provide similar services and competition is just a click away. Those with state-of-the-art offerings will be ahead of the pack and have more resources for ongoing improvements. Certainly, speed and uptime are not for free, but the good news is that even with a small budget, reliable applications can be realized.

One of the great promises of serverless has always been that it would free developers to focus on writing code without having to give too much consideration to the underlying infrastructure. But the advantages presented by the instantly, infinitely scalable nature of serverless come with limitations and unique considerations that you need to take into account.

These days, a major part of most IT budgets is the cloud bill. But unlike server-bound infrastructure budgeting, cloud bills can be unpredictable and highly variable from month to month. However, if organizations embrace cloud cost optimization to regulate cloud bills and avoid surprises, they’ll find themselves with considerable found money that can be reinvested into other areas.

Ever wondered what’s under the hood of your neighbors’ car, the situation in their wallet or the configuration of their serverless stack? Well wonder no more! Today we will bring you the statistics of Dashbird so you could compare your Lambda functions with others. Unfortunately, the car and the wallet thingy you should figure out on your own. Let’s start… (I hope you like charts)

Cloud environments are becoming increasingly complex, with applications and even infrastructures changing constantly. Despite their dynamic nature, these environments must be monitored constantly for teams to ensure the stability, security, and performance of workloads running in them. Tracking these infrastructure changes is one of the most important—and one of the most difficult—parts of maintaining a cloud environment.

I was recently called upon to secure an Nginx web server with HTTPS, and my goal was to set this up with a certificate obtained from AWS Certificate Manager. It took me a while to figure out how to get everything configured and working. Hopefully someone else who is attempting to do the same thing will read this and I can save you some time!

If you are hosting your application with Heroku, and find yourself faced with an unexplained error in your live system. What would you do next? Perhaps you don’t have a dedicated DevOps team, so where would you start your investigation? With Scout APM of course! We are going to show you how you can use Scout to find out exactly where the problem lies within your application code.

A while back, I wrote about how you can shave latency off every AWS SDK operation by enabling HTTP keep-alive, like this. It had the desired effect and I saw lots of people apply this technique in their projects. But it also resulted in the same 10 lines of code being copied and pasted everywhere! I began thinking about ways to distribute an optimized version of AWS SDK so everyone can benefit.