I am a proud lazy programmer. This means that if I can automate a task, I will absolutely do it. Especially if it means I can avoid doing the same thing more than once. Luckily, as an engineer, my laziness is an asset - because this week, it led me to write an HTML scraper for our Changelog, just so I wouldn’t have to manually update the Changelog feed on our new app homepage (btw, have you seen our new app homepage? It’s pretty sweet).

Famed management thinker Peter Drucker is often quoted as saying, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” Tracking and analyzing data of a system provides metrics to measure, predict, and improve the underlining health of the system. Logging data is the simplest act of collecting data for measurement and plays an important role in modern enterprises, as it provides a way to measure the health of hardware devices and software applications alike.

Back in 2008 when we began our journey, cloud computing was still relatively new. Though the term had a lot of buzz around it, organizations only considered the cloud as a place to experiment, not as a viable alternative to run production workloads. Now, the cloud has become the go-to strategy for enterprises and startups alike to deliver their digital business.

As your AWS usage grows, so will your stockpile of EBS snapshots and AMI images. Many of these are used for backups, while others are used to launch EC2 instances from Auto Scaling groups and EC2 launch templates. As your collection of AMI images grows, you will need to start rotating out the old AMI images.

I’m going to be biased in this post and it’s going to be ok because all the information you’re about to see are 100% correct and fair towards both services.

Analyst firm IDC forecasts that organizations will collectively spend $370 billion on public cloud services and infrastructure in 2022. Given the skyrocketing adoption of public cloud platforms, enterprises are using a number of approaches (lift and shift, replatforming, and refactoring) to smoothly transition on-prem workloads to the cloud.

Alibaba Cloud provides a comprehensive suite of cloud computing services to power businesses across the globe. We are excited to announce that our new integration with Alibaba Cloud is now in public beta. While the Datadog Agent has always been able to provide visibility into Alibaba Cloud instances, this new integration now enables you to also monitor the health and performance of Alibaba Cloud services (load balancers, managed databases, and more) in Datadog.

Amazon DynamoDB is a key-value and document database that allows you to easily scale to huge numbers of records with single digit millisecond performance. However, since it’s a managed service, you have less visibility with traditional monitoring tools. As such, it becomes even more important to take advantage of the available monitoring tools in AWS. In this post, we’ll explain how to use CloudWatch to monitor DynamoDB and what is important to watch.

Over the years DevOps has well established its methodologies for performing continuous deployment of applications and patches with the least amount of effort. Moreover, it has successfully paced itself to be competitive in the face of digital disruption, for which many organizations are keen to adopt in all facets.

With AWS Lambda, we can deploy and scale individual functions. However, we as engineers still like to think in terms of services and maintain a mapping between business capabilities and service boundaries. The service level abstraction makes it easier for us to reason about large systems. As such, cohesive functions that work together to serve a business feature are grouped together and deployed as a unit (i.e. a service) through CloudFormation.