If you’re working with microservices in a large distributed environment, you’ve probably got your monitoring and logging on lock, and you may even be lucky enough to have properly instrumented APM (distributed tracing) for consumer calls. But, did you know you’re likely still facing an observability gap? How many incidents have you worked that required hours of sleuthing only to end with a single team needing to roll back a deployment? It’s more common than you may think!

Our ongoing love affair with the cloud doesn’t show any signs of slowing. In 2021, end-user spending on public cloud services alone is predicted to reach $332 billion — or, to put it another way, more than the GDP of Chile, Finland or Vietnam. This affection is understandable. The cloud lets organizations build or adopt new services, expand to new regions and scale their offerings faster, more simply and — if used correctly — at lower cost than ever before.

Winners make good decisions fast, execute them quickly, and see higher growth rates and/or overall returns from their decisions. That’s according to a McKinsey study, ‘Decision-Making In The Age Of Urgency’. But the same study also pointed out that ineffective decision-making has significant implications for company productivity today. On average, survey respondents said they spent 37 percent of their time making decisions.

Before we jump into this, it’s important to note that older names, and still in use in some areas of AWS, are often referred to SSM which stands for Simple Systems Manager. AWS Systems Manager is designed to be a control panel for your AWS resources so you can manage them externally without having to SSH into the resources individually. What is important to remember with AWS Systems Manager is that features contained within the tool may occur additional pricing.

I recently had the pleasure of presenting a webinar with Microsoft Reactor. It was on implementing Azure Key Vault (a centralized place to manage all of your highly sensitive information on Azure). In this webinar, I share a step-by-step demonstration of how to integrate your information with the AKS cluster. The goal is to implement a solution that will allow an integration between Azure Key Vault, where I will store all my secrets; and my AKS, where I will use them.

Shipa Cloud is how we run the Shipa control plane on behalf of users in order to give them the fastest path possible to implementing Application as Code within their clusters. You can try out Shipa Cloud for free today by going to shipa.io. Besides being the fastest way possible to get started with Shipa, it also takes away the responsibility of upgrades, maintenance, and uptime of the control plane for our users, but that responsibility doesn’t just disappear.

With CloudCheckr, users can manage the cost, security, and compliance of their public cloud. It also offers a VMware-to-AWS migration service. But the platform's multi-level pricing structure can confuse some customers. Others feel CloudCheckr is overkill for their current cloud adoption stage. This quick guide walks you through cloud management tools like CloudCheckr.

A common denominator that Mattermost and most corporate applications share is the challenge users can face in successfully setting up a self-hosted instance in their own cloud account. Even with cloud-specific documentation, there’s almost always a hard requirement of understanding said documentation, resolving any errors encountered along the way, and maintaining the application.

We are excited to announce that Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus is now generally available! Now you can get all the benefits of open source-compatible monitoring with the ease of use of Google-scale managed services.