Five worthy reads is a regular column on five noteworthy items we’ve discovered while researching trending and timeless topics. Distributed cloud allows organizations to bring cloud computing closer to their location. This week we look at why it’s the future of cloud computing.

Amazon WorkSpaces enables you to provision virtual, cloud-based Microsoft Windows or Amazon Linux desktops for users. WorkSpaces eliminates the need to procure and deploy hardware or install complex software. You can quickly add or remove users as your needs change. Users can access their virtual desktops from multiple devices or web browsers.

A few weeks ago we posted the “How we built a serverless Stonks checker API for Wall Street Bets” article. And ever since, we’ve seen quite a lot of volume in the Stonks checker app. In this follow-up article, we will show you some interesting findings around the API. Over the past three weeks, we have seen a good amount of usage of the API we set up. You can see that there was a nice spike soon after the story broke.

In the face of unexpected crises or disruptions, maintaining business continuity has become more important than ever. Last year, businesses around the world had to shift to a remote workforce model overnight. Were their IT departments prepared for this massive shift?

Is my service desk investment paying off? Is my service desk delivering true business value? Are we incurring costs that are not under control? Are we able to leverage the service desk beyond IT use cases? If your current ITSM solution makes you question its true value and reliability, are you even using the right ITSM tool? We don’t think so! Let’s get one thing straight. We don’t advocate a one-size-fits-all approach.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) introduced a preview of Timestream in November 2018 before releasing the full version in October 2020. AWS Timestream is a time series database that can process trillions of events daily. It is faster and less costly than relational databases offered by AWS for processing time-series information. In this article, we will look at what Timestream can do compared to some other AWS databases, and how to use Timestream to help monitor the health of your system.

This article was written for the Dashbird blog by Maciej Radzikowski, who builds serverless AWS solutions and shares his knowledge on BetterDev.blog. Kinesis Data Streams are the solution for real-time streaming and analytics at scale. As we learned last November, AWS themselves use it internally to keep, well, AWS working. Kinesis works very well with AWS Lambda.

We are excited to share the latest development in our ongoing partnership with Microsoft. Available in public preview, you can now find, deploy, and manage Elasticsearch from within the Azure portal. Bring powerful enterprise search, observability, and security capabilities to your Azure environment with a user interface and tools that are already familiar to you.

We recently announced that users can find, deploy, and manage Elasticsearch from within the Azure portal. This new integration provides a simplified onboarding experience, all with the Azure portal and tooling you already know, so you can easily deploy Elastic without having to sign up for an external service or configure billing information.

Auto-instrumenting AWS Lambda Monitoring didn’t originate through a focus group or business plan. It started as a hackathon project that addressed the tedium of removing manual code instrumentation. Developer environments often include hundreds of AWS Lambda functions. And our existing instrumentation required initialization code to be manually placed on every single function.

In its mission to simplify building and running cloud-native applications for users, Amazon has announced the GA of AWS App Runner, a new purpose-built container application service. With security top of mind for most organizations shifting to the cloud, Sysdig has collaborated with AWS to enable threat detection for the new platform.

With the Honeycomb extension for AWS Lambda, you no longer need to make your Lambda functions Honeycomb-aware. Today, AWS announced the general availability of AWS Lambda Extensions, which make it easy for us to send logs from your Lambda functions directly to Honeycomb. In October, we announced Honeycomb’s extension for AWS Lambda as part of a preview launch. Today, we’re pleased to announce everyone can now use this extension to easily debug their AWS Lambda functions with Honeycomb.

Chia cryptocurrency is based on Proof Of Space, and distribute tokens according to a mechanism called plotting. In the last weeks, we've seen a lot of new accounts trying to launch and operate Chia miners from FlashDrive's infrastructure. Most of those accounts where created with fake/stolen credit cards for the sole purpose of getting Chia coins for free.

Logz.io now natively supports AWS App Runner. AWS has launched an innovative service called App Runner. This service builds upon Fargate, the AWS service that runs containers on Kubernetes without manual maintenance, patching, and upkeep of the containers or Kubernetes itself. App Runner takes this to the next level. It creates additional automation of and capabilities to deploy, run, and scale containerized workloads in concert with continuous deployment.

Today we’re excited to introduce the Kubernetes integration for Grafana Cloud, our composable observability platform bringing together metrics, logs, and traces with Grafana. Grafana Cloud users can now easily monitor and alert on core Kubernetes cluster metrics using the Grafana Agent, our lightweight observability data collector optimized for sending metric, log, and trace data to Grafana Cloud.

Knowing how to deploy and run applications has become a key part of modern app development, meaning that developers need expertise in a number of areas beyond their core application code. Whether it’s container orchestration, networking, scaling, or load balancing, there is a steep learning curve to being able to deploy and run an application at scale.

Spot by NetApp’s Ocean continuously optimizes Kubernetes clusters with a wide feature set tackling different aspects of running and managing Kubernetes containers in a cloud environment. To help users improve the efficiency and performance of their cloud environments, Ocean’s rightsizing capabilities provide recommendations that target over-provisioning and underutilization.

Cloudflare secures and ensures the reliability of your external-facing resources such as websites, APIs, and applications. It protects your internal resources such as behind-the-firewall applications, teams, and devices. This post will show you how Coralogix can provide analytics and insights for your Cloudflare log data – including traffic, performance, and security insights.

Serverless computing, a model in which the provider manages the server, lets developers focus on writing dedicated pieces of application logic. Serverless computing has been adopted by many development teams because it auto-scales. Auto-scaling relieves developers of allocation management tasks, so they do not need to worry about the allocation of server resources or being charged for resources they are not consuming.

Be aware that we’re not saying that you are in cloud nine, but that you may most likely be using the cloud. That is, if you use Google mail, Microsoft Office 365 office suite or you take a photo with your cell phone and then it gets automatically uploaded to iCloud or something similar, you are using the cloud.

Network traffic analysis is one of the core ways an organization can understand how workloads are performing, optimize network behavior and costs, and conduct troubleshooting—a must when running mission-critical applications in production. VPC Flow Logs is one such enterprise-grade network traffic analysis tool, providing information about TCP and UDP traffic flow to and from VM instances on Google Cloud, including the instances used as Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) nodes.

It’s the end of AWS Lambda support for Node.js v10. AWS Lambda support for Node.js 10 is due to end in August 2021. It’s time to switch! In this article, we’re discussing and comparing the differences of working with Node.js 10 and Node.js 14 + AWS Lambda, the impacts, and benefits of this change. AWS Lambda supports multiple versions of programming language runtimes, but not forever.

What are the crucial AWS Lambda metrics you should definitely be monitoring? Your application does not need to be “huge” for it to have enough functions and abstraction to get lost in it. As a DevOps engineer, you can’t cover every single factor. Showing relevant facts and asking the right questions is crucial! So when there’s a fire, you can troubleshoot in no time. Every organization is unique, and every workload has its own utility.

We are very excited to announce a key integration between VMware Tanzu and VMware Cloud on AWS that provides a significantly enhanced experience for our customers who want to deploy, run, and manage Kubernetes in VMware Cloud on AWS. With this integration, VMware Tanzu Mission Control now supports full lifecycle management—provisioning, upgrading, scaling, and deleting—of Tanzu Kubernetes clusters deployed on VMware Cloud on AWS.

Many industries have taken up Augmented Reality (AR) serious in order to increase production, sales and customer education. Organizations today are making use of several AR applications for multiple purposes to grab the attention of users. Surveys have predicted a vast growth in the AR VR markets in the near future as much money has been induced into the field. The application of AR technology is establishing a firm hold over the pharmaceutical industry as well.

Cloudflare is a content delivery network (CDN) that organizations across industries use to secure the reliability of their websites, applications, and APIs. With a wide array of security, networking, and performance-management tools, millions of web applications employ Cloudflare’s DDoS protection, load balancing, and serverless compute-monitoring features to maintain high performance and uptime.

To continuously innovate, many organizations are anchoring their infrastructure on container management solutions. The open source project Kubernetes is now the de facto standard for container management, and its popularity is growing in a number of ways. Here are some stats from a recent Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) survey.

Firstly, super excited to share that CloudHedge has successfully completed the IBM Cloud Paks certification, IBM has some stringent requirements for achieving this certification which includes having an Operator certified product listed on Red Hat Marketplace. CloudHedge’s intelligent App Modernization Platform enables enterprise customers to transform their legacy workloads to OpenShift container platform efficiently and effortlessly.

Lambda not logging to CloudWatch? It’s actually one of the most common issues that come up. Let’s briefly go over why this problem needs to be solved. CloudWatch is the central logging and monitoring service of the AWS cloud platform. It gives you insights into all the AWS services. Even if you can’t deploy and test serverless systems locally, CloudWatch tells you what’s happening to them.

The 2021 State of the Cloud Report shows that 90 percent of enterprises will increase their public cloud investments this year due to Covid-19. The OpsRamp Spring Release drives faster enterprise cloud migrations with automated monitoring, scalable alerting, powerful visualization, and expanded cloud monitoring coverage. Here are some key benefits of the Spring 2021 Release.

Spark is one of the most widely-used compute tools for big data analytics. It excels at real-time batch and stream processing, and powers machine learning, AI, NLP and data analysis applications. Thanks to its in-memory processing capabilities, Spark has risen in popularity. As Spark usage increases, the older Hadoop stack is on the decline with its various limitations that make it harder for data teams to realize business outcomes.

It is very important to create backups for your crutial EC2 instances. While AWS provides mechanisms to increase availability, the cloud is not infallible. EC2 provides a native backup format for your EC2 instances in the way of AMI images. But storage costs of the AMI images can build over time.

AWS announced AWS Lambda Extensions back in October 2020 and I wrote extensively about it at the time – what it is, how it works, and why you should care. In short, Lambda Extensions allow operational tools to integrate with your Lambda functions and run either in-process alongside your code or in a separate process. To better understand the problems they solve and their use cases, please read my previous article.

A big part of ensuring the availability of your applications is establishing and monitoring service-level metrics—something that our Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team does every day here at Google Cloud. The end goal of our SRE principles is to improve services and in turn the user experience. The concept of SRE starts with the idea that metrics should be closely tied to business objectives. In addition to business-level SLAs, we also use SLOs and SLIs in SRE planning and practice.

Whether you are new to AWS or have been to every re:Invent since 2012 you may have questions about cloud security and how it impacts your valuable technology and data. In particular, you might be wondering where AWS’s security responsibilities end and where yours begin? Which parts of the cloud can you rely on Amazon’s security team and technology to keep safe and which parts must you take care of?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently announced the launch of CloudWatch Metric Streams. Cloudwatch Streams can stream metrics from a number of different AWS resources using Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose to target destinations. The new service is different from the current architecture. Instead of polling, metrics are delivered via an Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose stream. This is a highly scalable and far more efficient way to retrieve AWS service metrics.

Today, almost every service now is offered in a “Cloud” variant. But what does that really mean? Are all clouds services equal? It’s easy to see why so many vendors rush to add a Cloud edition/variant of established software they sell. Undoubtedly, there has been a move to Cloud services across the industry, as more and more organizations seek to take advantage of the higher reliability and lower total cost of ownership that Cloud platforms promise.

Microservices are the future of software development. This approach serves as a server-side solution to development where services remain connected but work independently from each other. More developers are using microservices to improve performance, precision, and productivity, and analytical tools provide them with valuable insights about performance and service levels.

We are thrilled to announce that Lightrun — the world’s first dev-native continuous observability and debugging platform — has been recognized by Gartner as a Cool Vendor, based on its April 28 report titled, “Cool Vendors in Monitoring, Observability and Cloud Operations” by Padraig Byrne, Pankaj Prasad, Hassan Ennaciri, Venkat Rayapudi, and Gregg Siegfried. “Lightrun helps reduce mean time to repair (MTTR) by enabling continuous debugging capabilities.

Elastic's new frozen data tier decouples compute from storage and leverages low-cost object stores such as Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob Storage, or Amazon S3 to directly power searches. It provides unlimited scaling of storage while preserving the ability to efficiently query the data without any need to rehydrate it first, making it easier and cheaper to manage data at scale.

Designing and running workloads in the cloud is complex. Many services need to fit together in just the right way for optimal performance. The opportunity for error lurks around every corner. This is a high-stakes game with a huge premium on getting things right from the beginning. Even small mistakes can snowball. To help, AWS studied the architectures of thousands of its customers and supplemented that learning with insights from experts.

In order to avoid the repetitive tasks performed over the desktop, Microsoft has developed an extended service, the Power Automate Desktop. It has been recently announced by Microsoft, which has been made available to Windows 10 users. It is a new low-code Robotic process automation that enables business empowerment to automate those tasks that are repetitive and other manual tasks to focus better on higher-value work and to establish more in their corresponding areas of work.

Google Cloud Platform is growing quickly, providing solutions for everything from cloud storage to managed Kubernetes to serverless computing. Since Google App Engine launched in 2008, Google’s suite of serverless products has expanded to help enterprises accelerate application development without having to manage or scale their own infrastructure.

A while ago, a merry bunch on Reddit at the subreddit r/WallStreetsBets (WSB) took on Wall Street. Ironically, through an app called Robinhood. As Alanis Morisette would say, “A little too ironic, don’t ya think?” You had to be in there and in the know at the right time to benefit from the situation. That’s why we built a serverless API to keep track of all the hot and trending stock chats on WSB, that will notify you when the next GME is about to blow up.

Serverless computing is becoming increasingly popular in software development due to its flexibility of development and the ability it affords to test out and run solutions with minimal overhead cost. Vendors like AWS provide various tools that enable businesses to develop and deploy solutions without investing in or setting up hardware infrastructures. In this post, we’ll cover the many different services that AWS provides for supporting serverless computing.

This piece was originally three different blogs but is now one. In this piece, we lay out three ways you can improve your AWS Lambda performance. So much has been written about Lambda cold starts. It’s easily one of the most talked-about and yet, misunderstood topics when it comes to Lambda. Depending on who you talk to, you will likely get different advice on how best to reduce cold starts.

In 2021 it’s common practice for businesses to use a pay-as-you-go/use pricing model. It’s no different with Amazon. It’s also the primary reason why this article is such an important read for all those looking to reduce their AWS Lambda costs. In this article, we will go over six actionable strategies to optimize the cost relating to our AWS Lambda usage. One of the main reasons for choosing to move into the cloud is the ability to reduce costs.

For decades, application development and operations teams have struggled with the best way to generate, collect, and analyze telemetry data from systems and apps. In 2010, we discussed our approach to telemetry and tracing in the Dapper papers, which eventually spawned the open-source OpenCensus project, which merged with OpenTracing to become OpenTelemetry.

Cloud MSPs or managed service providers are great at helping companies properly leverage the public cloud, typically handling cloud strategy, implementation and day-to-day operations for their customers. However, when it comes to things like customizable billing, analyzing cloud spend per customer, optimizing cost and increasing profit margins, MSPs are over-burdened with complex, manual processes.