Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Serverless architecture is a bit of a misnomer. The term itself implies your applications aren’t running on any servers, which isn’t the case. Serverless architecture means a cloud provider—such as Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS), or Microsoft Azure—provides and owns the back-end infrastructure, which has its own pros and cons. Serverless architecture is sometimes also referred to as function as a service (FaaS) or serverless computing.

The addition of Amazon Web Services and VMware to the Defense Department’s milCloud 2.0 contract will make it easier for agencies to transition applications and services to the cloud. However, the acceleration of this effort may bring its own challenges. MilCloud is a substantial operation, with more than 1,200 virtual servers as of early 2021. The addition of AWS and VMware will allow agencies to add to this number, making an already complex service even more challenging to manage.

To keep their applications and websites available and accessible, today’s businesses put a lot of emphasis on infrastructure monitoring to ensure their servers are healthy and running. Amid the hustle, many companies overlook the need to monitor a different aspect of their application: user experience.

Many years ago, in my earliest IT jobs in Omaha, Nebraska, I realized the field of data was going to continue to evolve and, as such, there would always be a need for people who worked with and understood data. Regardless of which industry someone worked in—financial, medical, governmental, transportation, or retail—someone would have to work with and maintain business data, or the business would fail. This realization led me into the world of databases and SQL Server.

IT environments are getting increasingly complex and can often straddle on-premises gear, private cloud, public and/or multi-cloud, and SaaS environments... oh, and it’s a moving target. Your legacy applications may have to reincarnate in one of these forms with minimal disruption. And when things go wrong, you need all the help and pointers you can get to identify the root source of the problem and what it’s impacting.

Log files are an important source of information about the state of an application and how it’s functioning. Therefore, log management and analysis are critical to application performance monitoring.

Over the past several years, I've helped numerous customers migrate SQL Server workloads to Azure SQL, including Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, and Azure SQL Virtual Machines. In this article, I'll explain some of the challenges of optimizing the compute cost for an Azure SQL Database deployment and review how the serverless compute tier can greatly simplify it.

Federal IT pros have historically had limited time and resources; this makes it crucial to find the source of application slowdowns or outages as quickly as possible. Database virtualization can help by allowing IT pros to separate the storage and application layers within the application stack more quickly, providing easier access to root-cause issues. An estimated 70% of databases are virtualized. Yet, the benefits of virtualized databases come with additional challenges.

As enterprise applications changed over time to serve different business needs and computer systems evolved from the monolithic architecture of mainframes into client-server and distributed systems, mechanisms for communications between different tiers of computer systems also had to develop.

Over the past several years, I've helped numerous customers migrate SQL Server workloads to Azure SQL, including Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, and Azure SQL Virtual Machines. In this article, I'll explain some of the challenges of optimizing the compute cost for an Azure SQL Database deployment and review how the serverless compute tier can greatly simplify it.