Among the many, MANY announcements at re:Invent this year is one that settles a years-long debate or concern amongst people considering using AWS Lambda to build serverless applications: cold starts. AWS Lambda is now 5 years old. For all of that time, there’s been a concern about latency the first time a function is called. Well, fret no more: with Provisioned Concurrency you can pay a tiny fee to know Lambda functions are always available.

Microsoft Azure DevOps is a leading platform for planning, building, and deploying code. We are excited to announce a new integration with Azure DevOps, which helps organizations see the full picture as they build and deploy dynamic applications. Teams can get new insights into their builds, releases, work items, and code events; understand how deployments impact application performance; and even halt bad updates automatically.

The 2019 AWS annual user conference, re:Invent, didn’t disappoint, with several intriguing announcements from the cloud giant. There was ample focus on Compute, with AWS Outposts and the new Graviton computing instances incorporating the ARM processing framework. There was also a renewed focus on AI and machine learning, as one would expect. Here’s my take on what this year’s show means for people working in IT operations and DevOps:

At re:Invent 2019, Farrah and I gave a talk on our paths into the tech industry, how serverless helped us both build some of our first products, and how serverless represents a new mindset. I’d wanted to share a version of that talk on our blog for those who couldn’t make it, though we hope to give it again in the near future.

We are happy to announce that Elastic Stack 7.5 brings support for the Azure Monitor service in Metricbeat and Azure activity logs and AD (Active Directory) activity reports in Filebeat.

Our December update includes a new role model for users in a SIGNL4 team, great new app features and integration with Azure Sentinel. Two default user roles are now available in each SIGNL4 team: Administrator and User. This allows for restricting standard user rights versus administrative access. For existing teams, all users are migrated to administrators, i.e. you should check this role assignment and downgrade some team members to users yourself if necessary.

Today's customers demand high-performing, low-latency applications. If your business is running applications on a hybrid cloud with Amazon Web Services (AWS), you need a powerful suite of monitoring tools to ensure optimal performance.

Cloudtrail logs provide excellent insight into how your AWS account is being used. They record all activity by the web console, SDKs, and APIs. With help from the AWS plugin, getting this information into Graylog is easier than ever. In this blog post you'll set up the required AWS resources, configure the Graylog input, and do some basic searches to explore its capabilities.

A few weeks ago, Amazon announced a new feature for EBS snapshots: Amazon EBS Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR). Normally, accessing data on new EBS volumes was quite slow as the data is lazy-loaded from S3. When Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR) has been enabled on an EBS snapshot, new EBS volumes created from that snapshot will allow fast data access. While this feature is very good, it’s very expensive to keep enabled on an EBS snapshot for a long time.