Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

If you’ve ever been in charge of your company’s cloud cost, you likely understand how painful it can be to accurately allocate shared cloud spend. In fact, in the 2021 State of FinOps report, “dealing with shared costs” was the second most common challenge faced by FinOps. Today, I’m excited to share that we’ve taken a huge step toward alleviating that pain.

One of Checkly's strengths is the capability to monitor key transactions on your site. It'd be missed opportunity if we didn't reuse it to monitor our own product! But for some important flows that comes with a couple of pitfalls. In this post, we'll take a closer look at how we monitor one of our top key flows: signup.

The Simple Notification Service, or SNS for short, is one of the central services to build serverless architectures in the AWS cloud. SNS itself is a serverless messaging service that can distribute massive numbers of messages to different recipients. These include mobile end-user devices, like smartphones and tablets, but also other services inside the AWS ecosystem. SNS’ ability to target AWS services makes it the perfect companion for AWS Lambda.

“Try turning it off and on again.” This advice normally works for my mom, but not for me. When I needed to present at an event last year, I got frustrated when I couldn’t connect to the network. The front desk at the venue referred me to technical services. “Uh-oh,” I thought. “Here we go.” But I was wrong. The technical services person quickly assessed my level of know-how and adjusted her talk track to cater to my needs.

Software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) is a software overlay that decouples WAN configuration and management from the underlying network transport medium (5G/LTE, MPLS, xDSL, etc) and dynamically routes WAN traffic. To the uninitiated, that’s a mouthful. But it’s one of the most interesting trends of the last few years. Let’s jump on the bandwagon! Time for a primer on SD-WAN, why it matters, and where it’s heading now and into the future.

We know customers and users today demand new features to be frequently released to their favorite apps. Plus they expect any bugs or issues hindering a great user experience to be fixed—and fast. Here we're going to cover new capabilities built to help you keep up with the business by measuring how well your team works in small batches and identifying previously invisible cross-team dependencies in your development and delivery processes.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I said a lot of inflammatory things about metrics. “Metrics are shit salad.” “Metrics are simply nerfed dimensions.” “Metrics suck,” “metrics are legacy,” “metrics and time series aggregates will fucking kneecap you.” I cannot tell a lie; Twitter will testify that I’ve spent the past six years ragging on metrics.

In December, information security researchers discovered a serious vulnerability in the popular open-source logging library, Log4j. If exploited, this vulnerability, known as Log4Shell, could allow malicious attackers to execute code remotely on any targeted computer. Millions of computers use Log4j. According to one study, 93% of all cloud environments are affected by the vulnerability.

If there is one thing that the pandemic has given us apart from a “new normal,” it's the massive spike in ransomware attacks across the globe. Despite law enforcement agencies telling victims to avoid paying ransoms, the average amount of rin 2021 exceeded a whopping $102 million per month.

In this episode of Mooving to… Stability: The Role of Catastrophic Failure in Software Design, we had the opportunity to chat with Jeff Atwood, yes that Jeff Atwood of, Coding Horror, Stack Overflow, and Discourse (Chief Happiness Officer). Jeff started writing 911 software in Boulder, Colorado for a small company, which was a crash-course in writing code for software that has real consequences. With this unique and deep perspective, B.J.