So, you’ve decided to use Azure as your primary cloud platform and want to calculate your infrastructure costs. You estimate them based on listed prices, and rest assured that your startup/project will meet its budget. And then, suddenly, at the end of the month, you receive an invoice from Azure for an amount two times higher than you originally expected.

Amazon CloudWatch monitors metrics of your Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources in real time and can trigger alarms when a metric goes above or below certain thresholds. Typically, Amazon CloudWatch sends out alarms by posting a message to an SNS (Amazon Simple Notification Service) topic, which distributes the message via several mediums, including email, SMS, and Lambda functions. Setting a CloudWatch alarm can be complex.

I have been building a feature on elmah.io lately that picks up validation results from an external API. Before serverless was a thing, I would probably have done this using a scheduled task or Windows Service using Hangfire or similar. But after having migrated everything to serverless Azure Functions, I wanted a good solution running similarly. Azure Durable Functions turned out as the perfect companion and in this post, I'll show you a possible way to implement polling of an asynchronous API.

High-quality cloud cost allocation has become an existential issue for businesses. In order to get as much out of their (mounting) cloud investments as possible, business leaders need to know how much they’re spending in the cloud, what/who they’re spending it on, and whether there’s a good reason for it. In its ideal form, cost allocation answers all these questions.

You may have heard the word “blockchain” floating around quite a lot recently. However, you may be unsure of what it actually means. However, with companies expected to spend $20 billion per annum on blockchain technical services by the end of 2024, it’s time we all got a bit more familiar with it. Below, we will explain what blockchain is and the technology behind it so you can get a better understanding.

These three top cloud providers are used daily by millions of users across the world – but what sets them apart? We take a magnifying glass to the features that matter.

Maintain high uptime and performance for your APIs without any overheads using Google Cloud’s API monitoring tools.

One of the key attributes of DevOps and SRE engineers is their ability to meticulously observe and monitor all of their applications. A task which can be achieved more efficiently by centralizing all generated logs to a central endpoint. By centralizing logging, engineers can, at any time, have an accurate overview of all events which take place across their applications, from just one place. Storing logs in an external system also allows companies to ensure compliance with many certifications.

Just as there are a handful of stages to describe the financial journey from startup to established company — pre-seed and seed funding, followed by series A, B, and C funding — there are also stages to the process of achieving a healthy understanding of your costs.

Don’t forget, it’s the hardware that makes the cloud The main issues we see with clients and cloud implementations are that it can be very difficult for them to get a clear idea of what it is they are buying and how well it will perform. While the consumption and billing models are clear, it can still be hard to know how much you will pay each month. But what is hard is predicting exactly what the level of performance you will get. Some of this is inevitable.