At SquaredUp, we are all about dashboards and visualizations that enable you to build the ideal single pane of glass. If you work in monitoring, you know that designing the perfect dashboards that give you all of your important metrics at a glance, is easier said than done. Most of the time, it takes several attempts to optimize a dashboard for easy reading, and more often than not, this step is neglected. I wouldn’t recommend skipping over this step though.

Persistent connections allow HAProxy to optimize resource usage, lower latency on both the client and server side, and support connection pooling. HTTP is a layer 7 protocol that’s transmitted over a TCP connection. It works in a client-server model and follows the request-response paradigm, which means that a client sends a request to a server, which then replies with a response. From this statement, you can infer two different ways of operating.

At AWS re:Invent today, Dr. Werner Vogels, VP and CTO of Amazon.com, announced a partnership between AWS and Grafana Labs, resulting in the Amazon Managed Service for Grafana, a scalable managed offering that provides AWS customers a native way to run Grafana directly within AWS alongside all their other AWS services. We’d like to give a big thanks to the whole Grafana community. Not only have they inspired us with so many great use cases, but they help us build better software every day.

Microsoft Azure and Microsoft, in general, has a history of being seen as designed for big enterprises only. Those days are in the past. Azure is working its way to the front of the pack for cloud services. It is easy to transition your workflows to Azure because it connects well with other Microsoft tools you use. Even though it is a smoother transition, it is just as complex and complicated as other large cloud providers.

As companies adopt container technologies, they face a significant challenge - how do we secure this new attack surface? It’s an issue that you often see backlogged in favor of solving storage, networking and monitoring issues. Add on the challenge of educating the workforce on one of the fastest-growing open source projects to date, and it’s no wonder security has lagged as the primary focus for teams.

Cloud environments are always susceptible to security issues. A significant contributor to this problem is misconfigured resources. Traditional IT Infrastructure was somewhat static; server hardware only changed every few years. With few changes occurring, security was also more static. The modern cloud environment is a much different challenge. In cloud environments, servers, services, and storage are created with automation, resulting in a dynamic and potentially ever-changing server environment.

In 2020 ‘pivot’ has become the trendy word of the business class, referring mainly to a company’s willingness to adopt technology to maintain internal team communication and productivity. Apart from front-line workers across disciplines who have courageously put others before themselves to provide healthcare and daily necessities, shelter in place, and work from home orders forced businesses to reassess their needs…and quickly.

Cloud native observability is at a watershed moment. The explosion of microservices has created previously unseen amounts of monitoring data, limiting the ability of humans and computer systems to extract meaning from data with last-generation tools. Debugging is often a process of detecting correlation, and then turning correlations into causal connections. This is where modern cloud native tooling comes in.

We’ve already shared our reflections on seven years with skills maps, and our realization that we needed something more. We already had much of that information, but people really struggled to take it on and consume it. We needed a better delivery mechanism than our alternative to the skills maps which we called ‘What Good Looks Like’ documents.

In a global marketplace, competition is stiff. It's hard enough to get the attention of your prospective customer, but once you have it, you don't want to lose it. This kind of drain can mean the end of your business. Any small business owner knows that the life's blood of their business is loyal customers. It is well worth the trouble to keep your customers happy and have them continue to give you their business. When they are satisfied, they naturally tell others about you. This is business growth.