We currently have six major cloud platforms offering serverless products, AWS Lambda being the pioneer. Our goal is to provide a quick way to compare and evaluate all. For each service, we will be evaluating: There are smaller service providers on the market that are focused on serverless, but we won’t cover them in the present analysis. For the pricing comparison, we considered regions in the United States east coast. Let the battle begin!

Lambda Layers were introduced by AWS in late 2018 as a way to simplify the developer’s life when managing dependencies and shared resources across a multi-Lambda stack. It’s a versatile feature that brings many benefits, which we will discuss in this article. Using Lambda Layers does increase complexity to monitor and maintain your applications, but there’s no need to fear.

Kubernetes is a powerful platform that has shifted the way modern software operates and scales over the past five years. It’s got a strong open source community and benefits from innovation from the collective. Also, some of its current shortcomings are: difficulties in installation, complexity, and customization. In many ways, Kubernetes is like the Linux kernel: it provides a framework for running software, but none of the tools. This is where Kubernetes distributions (or distros) come in.

If you’ve dealt with lambda functions you may have run across the RequestEntityTooLargeException - * byte payload is too large for the Event invocation type (limit 131072 bytes) AWS Lambda exception that occurs when a function is invoked with too large of a payload. Current AWS Lambda limits are set at 6 MB for synchronous/RequestResponse invocations, and 128 K for asynchronous/Event invocations.

Another massive data breach was uncovered last week (30.6.19). The US-Israeli based company Cybereason traced via a year-long operation (called “Operation Soft Cell”), an attack that had been underway since 2012. This time it was the telecommunication sector that was hit. The most worrisome fact about this breach is not only the methods that were used (which were highly sophisticated) but the purpose of the hacking.

The following article is an excerpt from the book Achieving DevOps, a novel about delivering the best Agile, DevOps and Microservices, written by Dave Harrison and Knox Lively. This article is published with the author’s permission. A lateral line is how a fish monitors the surrounding water for changes in pressure, allowing it to understand the environment. This is how fish can survive in a very harsh, always-changing environment; without it, the fish is ‘blind’ and cannot survive.

In a Kubernetes cluster, the machines are divided into two main groups: worker nodes and master nodes. Worker nodes run your pods and the applications within them, whereas the master node runs the Kubernetes Control Plane, which is responsible for the management of the worker nodes. The Control Plane makes scheduling decisions, monitors the cluster, and implements changes to get the cluster to a desired state.

What if I told you that it took me just under 10 minutes, 8 commands and 6 mouse clicks to create this bar chart informing me — big surprise — that I have too many open tabs in Chrome on my Mac? That might sound like a lot to some readers, but if you’re not a stranger to ELK you’ll know that installing the stack, even for testing and development purposes, usually involves a whole lot more than that. ELK can be installed on almost any system and in any environment.

An API check is comprised of multiple HTTP/S checks configured for uptime monitoring. In API monitoring, tracking latency and availability provide first notice of a potential problem. The same extends to general uptime monitoring, where serving the best and fastest user experience is critical. Functionally, an API and HTTP/S check might do the job of monitoring API endpoints. Both can post or expect strings in response, and both provide alert of downtime.

On May 22nd, more than 8,500 people gathered online for Microsoft’s long-anticipated Windows Server Summit (WSS) – the annual virtual event that covers the latest and greatest in all things Windows Server. It is where industry experts announce and demo exciting new technologies every year – and we are happy to share that this year, Squared Up’s Windows Admin Center (WAC) extension has earned a spot on the list, plus the Microsoft stamp of approval.