AWS is one of the primary providers for services that help users deploy and manage their containerized applications on the cloud. Since launching ECS in 2014 and EKS in 2017, AWS has learned a lot about running containers at scale and in production. AWS developed Bottlerocket OS, a new operating system for hosting containers. This OS was specifically designed to address gaps left by the ECS and EKS-optimized AMIs, which are based on operating systems that run traditional software applications.

While architectures and platforms like Kubernetes get a lot of attention in discussions about application modernization, we ignore the data layer at our own risk. How applications and users access data is a concern that gets more important by the day. It’s a trend we’ve seen playing out for a while, as technological concerns around latency and scalability have ceded ground to business-level concerns around compliance, security, and data privacy.

If your business is among the more than one million organizations that use Amazon Web Services (AWS) to host applications and data, there is a good chance that you struggle to monitor AWS. After all, although AWS makes it easy to deploy cloud services, collecting and analyzing data about those services in an efficient, centralized way can be a real challenge.

Lightrun, the continuous debugging and observability company, today announced the release of a free, self-service version of its popular debugging solution for developers. Lightrun Cloud is not only the most powerful debugger a developer can use to troubleshoot production applications live from within the IntelliJ IDE – but also the easiest to set-up, with a complete self-service experience that gets developers up and running in less than five minutes.

Defining and managing your AWS resources using an Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) approach implemented with CloudFormation templates makes a lot of sense. While implementing IaC is a widely accepted best practice, it does come with challenges. Managing your infrastructure from lines of code and text-file templates, in the case of AWS CloudFormation, can quickly become overwhelming. We built stack.new to ease that pain.

The promise of running a business on the cloud is that — in theory, at least — you should be able to scale your infrastructure up and down with your customer utilization. This should lead, again in theory, to less maintenance and more opportunity for innovation.

During the past twenty years, so much has changed in the IT office. Two decades ago, we were still using dial-up modems. Now, the entire world wide web is at our fingertips, and our world of IT is more efficient but complicated too. A few significant IT trends have also developed during this time. One of the most important is the cloud that has also become a common buzzword in business. Like many buzzwords, there is a lot of excitement and confusion surrounding the term.

2020 was a difficult year for all of us, and it was no different for engineering teams. Many software releases were postponed, and the industry slowed its development speed quite a bit. But at least at AWS, some teams released updates out of the door at the end of the year. AWS Lambda received two significant improvements: With these two new features and Lambda Layers, we now have three ways to add code to Lambda that isn’t directly part of our Lambda function.

A year ago, we wrote about our experiences as early adopters of Graviton2, and how we were able to see 30% price-performance improvements on one dogfood workload from switching to the arm64 architecture. In those initial experiments, we validated running 20% fewer shepherd ingest workers, using the m6g instance type, which cost 10% less per instance compared to c5 instances.