As the world becomes increasingly digital-first, it’s more important than ever for organizations to keep services always-on, innovate quickly, and deliver great customer experiences. Uptime is money, so it’s no surprise that many have made the shift to cloud in recent years in order to make use of its flexibility and scale—while controlling costs. And while 2020 wasn’t easy for any organization, those that are thriving have embraced the digital mindset.

Contextual Code specializes in enterprise-level projects for state government agencies. We routinely tackle difficult web content management implementations, migrations, integrations, customizations, and operations. We know what it takes to get a project off the ground and onto the web. We use Platform.sh as our primary hosting platform because it’s incredibly flexible and it provides a vast list of services that can be set up very easily.

AWS offers a Compute Optimizer tool that uses machine learning to analyze your historical utilization metrics and then recommend optimal AWS resources to help you reduce costs and improve performance. And it is free, you just need to opt in to the service in the AWS Compute Optimizer Console. Sounds great, right? Well, yes and no. It is a useful little tool, but if you do not understand its pros and cons, you will not be as optimized as you may think. Here is a breakdown.

Function as a service (FaaS) offerings like AWS Lambda are a blessing for software development. They remove many of the issues that come with the setup and maintenance of backend infrastructure. With much of the upfront work taken out of the process, they also lower the barrier to start a new service and encourage modularization and encapsulation of software systems. Testing distributed systems and serverless cloud infrastructures.

We are excited to announce support for Google Compute Engine (GCE) N2 general purpose virtual machine (VM) types, and additional hardware configuration options powered by N2 custom machine types. N2 VMs leverage Intel 2nd Generation Xeon Scalable processors and provide a balance of compute, memory, and storage. N2 machine types also offer more than a 20% improvement in price-performance over the first-generation N1 machines.

According to AWS, “Creating a software system is a lot like constructing a building. If the foundation is not solid, structural problems can undermine the integrity and function of the building.” This is especially true when it comes to the cloud. If an organization doesn’t effectively oversee key areas of its foundation, it’s likely the result is not going to be successful. When it comes to cloud management, we look at it through the lens of the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

When you are experiencing an issue with your application or service, having deep visibility into both the infrastructure and the software powering your apps and services is critical. Most monitoring services provide insights at the Virtual Machine (VM) level, but few go further. To get a full picture of the state of your application or service, you need to know what processes are running on your infrastructure.