Amazon Web Services provides its users with the ability to create temporary credentials via the use of AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS). These temporary credentials work pretty much in the same manner like permanent credentials created from AWS IAM Service. There are however two differences.

We’ve heard from customers about how important it is to be able to reliably operate your applications and infrastructure running on Google Cloud. In particular, observability is critical to reliable operations. To help you quickly gain insight into your Google Cloud environment, we’ve added 21 new features to Cloud Operations, the observability suite we launched earlier this year, which gives you access to all our operations capabilities directly from the Google Cloud Console.

One of the best things about cloud computing is how it converts technical efficiencies into cost-savings. Some of those efficiencies are just part of the tool kit, like pay-per-use Lambda jobs. Good DevOps brings a lot of savings to the cloud, as well. It can smooth out high-friction state management challenges. Sprucing up how you provision cloud services, for example, speeds up deployments. That’s where treating infrastructure the same as workflows from the rest of your codebase comes in.

Some time ago, an ex-colleague of mine at DAZN received an alert through PagerDuty. There was a spike in error rate for one of the Lambda functions his team looks after. He jumped onto the AWS console right away and confirmed that there was indeed a problem. The next logical step was to check the logs to see what the problem was. But he found nothing. And so began an hour-long ghost hunt to find clues as to what was failing and why there were no error messages.

During my career, I’ve taken part in many on-call rotations and post-mortems. The longest on-call rotation I’ve ever had — no breaks, vacations, or holidays — lasted for a whopping 2.5 years at Lucid Software. I’m jaded. I strongly prefer stability to tinkering with shiny new toys. Very few software engineers start this way, but enough of them make the transition after having been bit enough times by a bad release.

Another year of empowering DevOps teams has passed and what a year it’s been! I’d like to take a moment to reflect on the journey, the milestones and challenges this past year encompassed. The last year has been our most transformational to date. We’ve had a huge amount of ups and downs and I’m incredibly proud to say that we got through it and our organization is more resilient, more aligned in our vision and closer as a result.

We’re pleased and honored to be part of the Serverless revolution - continuously innovating to make processes and day-to-day tasks for serverless users more efficient, seamless and enjoyable. So let’s get right into the new and exciting stuff now! Earlier this year, Dashbird launched the very well-received Insights Engine designed to encourage a proactive approach when building and operating serverless applications.

Incident response playbooks are a set of actions that need to be executed by your incident repsonders depending on the nature of the outage. Having well defined incident response playbooks can be extremely critical, especially during high customer impact events, that you would typically classify as Sev-0 incidents.