John F. Kennedy described the journey into space as "...the most hazardous, and dangerous, and greatest adventure of which man has ever embarked." And that can sometimes feel like it applies to cloud asset management, too! While there are many analogies one can draw between space and the cloud, the idea of a vast, seemingly limitless, expanding area where new, ever stranger, things are discovered all the time seems quite apt.
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.
As serverless application architectures have gained popularity, AWS Lambda has become the best-known service for running code on demand without having to manage the underlying compute instances. From an ops perspective, running code in Lambda is fundamentally different than running a traditional application. Most significantly from an observability standpoint, you cannot inspect system-level metrics from your application servers.
Have you ever have that dream where you’re in a class on Classical Tibetan Algebra? And you haven’t done any homework all semester? AND it’s the final? That was me in this session: I was WAY in over my head with this one. Tod Golding’s material was so high-level that I got a nose bleed. Seriously. My nose started gushing 10 minutes in. This Portland dewdrop is NOT used to the dry desert and casino AC air.
As you monitor the health and performance of your infrastructure and applications, you also need to be able to identify potential threats to the security of those components. To help address this challenge, we’re pleased to announce that Datadog now integrates with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer, a new IAM feature that helps administrators ensure that they have securely configured access to their resources.
Cold Starts have been a massive issue with FaaS. In summary, it makes functions slower to startup in some cases. That’s in the opposite way of every effort to improve web applications performance. Many efforts have been made in the recent years to solve AWS Lambda cold starts or educate on handling them. Many have mitigated the issue, but none really solved it. AWS has just made a great progress on the area with the Provisioned Capacity feature announcement.
As our application scales and many services are accessing a multitude of data points for each workload needed, it is difficult to ensure each part of the system has the right set of data access permissions. In today’s world, one of the worse nightmares of a software business is data leaking and data privacy issues. Not only it affects the brand reputation, but could also expose the company to heavy fines and other regulatory sanctions.
So you want to install Elastic Cloud Enterprise (you know, the orchestration solution for the Elastic Stack that simplifies and standardizes how you deploy, upgrade, resize, configure, and monitor one to many clusters from a single UI/API) Installing ECE on one host isn’t tough. Installing it on two isn’t much harder. However, when you start dealing with 3, 5, 7, 11, etc., the complexity grows, as does the work involved in operating and maintaining (upgrading!) it all.
Another day of re:Invent is over and it’s all been amazing and overwhelming. And yes, the medals really do spin. It was a huge honor to be named an AWS Serverless Hero a few weeks ago. As I prepare for more conference talks in the upcoming months, I’m reflecting on what it means to be granted this honor despite having only written my first lines of code earlier this year.
