Over the past few years, Google has grown its cloud services to include more than 100 products and services. Today, Google Cloud rubs shoulders with the top two cloud service providers. Yet, managing a Google Cloud environment has become increasingly challenging as the platform expands its GCP tools. It’s not just Google Cloud. The same is true today for other leading public cloud providers. To its credit, Google Cloud provides plenty of tools to help you get the most out of the platform.

For those who remember the tech world before the COVID digitalisation gold-rush, the 2019 assertion by Gartner that 'The Data Centre Is (Almost) Dead, ruffled feathers. The report warned that by 2025, 80% of enterprises will shut down their traditional data centres. In fact, 10% of organisations already have. Then the pandemic hit and the global demand for world-class user experiences (for workforces and customers alike) exploded.

Developers and SREs choose to host their applications on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) for its reliability, speed, and ease of use. On Google Cloud, development teams are finding additional value in migrating to Kubernetes on GKE, leveraging the latest serverless options like Cloud Run, and improving traditional, tiered applications with managed services. Elastic Observability offers 16 out-of-the-box integrations for Google Cloud services with more on the way.

Amazon Bedrock is a fully managed service that offers foundation models (FMs) built by leading AI companies, such as AI21 labs, Meta, and Amazon along with other tools for building generative AI applications. After enabling access to validation and training data stored in Amazon S3, customers can fine-tune their FMs to invoke tasks such as text generation, content creation, and chatbot Q&A—without provisioning or managing any infrastructure.

AWS Step Functions allows you to coordinate activity from hundreds of services—including AWS Lambda, Amazon EKS, and Amazon API Gateway—to build and orchestrate serverless workflows. With Step Functions, you organize work into workflows known as state machines, in which each state defines a task or decision and specifies the next state in the workflow.

Discover LightMesh’s latest IP address management upgrades, featuring streamlined subnet imports and collaborative Support Teams, transforming network efficiency. Exciting news from LightMesh! We’ve enhanced our IP address management (IPAM) solution, offering powerful upgrades for efficient network management.

Upcoming specific new AWS regulations will significantly impact how businesses handle their AWS operations. Starting from January 15, 2024, AWS will no longer permit the resale of discounted Reserved Instances (RIs) bought from the Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance Marketplace. This update aligns with AWS’s service terms, particularly Section 5.5, which explicitly prohibits the resale of discounted RIs.

Today the lowest cost media per terabyte for backups is still tape, even after factoring in the handling costs of manually loading and unloading tape libraries, and logistics surrounding off-site storage. However, while inexpensive, tapes are inflexible. And when used as an offline solution it can take many hours to retrieve them from offsite storage – not to mention the additional time required to load them into a tape library before a recovery can even start.

You probably know that it is important to apply security updates. You may not be as clear on the details of how to do that. We are going to explain best practices for applying Ubuntu updates to single instances and what the built-in unattended-upgrades tool does and does not do.

How Engineering-Led Optimization Works Achieve Cloud Efficiency Without Slowing Down Innovation Historically, cloud cost optimization has been the responsibility of finance teams. Engineers have bought what they claim to need to build top-notch software; finance teams have gotten (and paid) the bill; neither has had an in-depth understanding of what the other is doing.