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Stop Your Database From Hating You With This One Weird Trick

Let’s not bury the lede here: we use Observability-Driven Development at Honeycomb to identify and prevent DB load issues. Like every online service, we experience this familiar cycle. This is not a bad thing! It’s a normal thing. Databases are easy to start with and do an excellent job of holding important data.

What Your Website is Going to Lose if it is Not Secured

The very foundation of exchange between web & client-server protocol started with HTTP, where HTML form was the source of fetching resources - from documents to images. This extensible protocol was designed in the early '90s and has evolved over time. Cache or authentication is the main feature handled by HTTP which has never been compromised. Still, there are dangerous sites that are keen on corrupting the digital world.

Firefox add-on outage: Yet another reminder for companies to enforce PKI life cycle automation

More often than we’d like to admit, we tend to underestimate the impact of every moving part within an organization—especially those that seem small or insignificant. And usually, it’s not until we’re facing the fallout of neglecting that seemingly insignificant factor when we realize what a mistake we’ve made.

Lambda and Kinesis - beware of hot streams

Back in 2017, I wrote a post titled “3 pro tips for Developers working with Kinesis streams”, in which I explained why you should avoid hot streams with many Lambda subscribers. When you have five or more functions subscribed to a Kinesis stream you will start to notice lots of ReadProvisionedThroughputExceeded errors in CloudWatch.

AKS Cluster Performance: How to Better Operate Kubernetes in Azure

AKS is the managed service from Azure for Kubernetes. When you create an AKS cluster, Azure creates and operates the Kubernetes control plane for you at no cost. The only thing you do as a user is to say how many worker nodes you’d like, plus other configurations we’ll see in this post. So, with that in mind, how can you improve the AKS cluster performance of a service in which Azure pretty much manages almost everything?

Why Cloud Cost Optimization Shouldn't be Finance's Responsibility

If you’re a cloud architect or engineering lead, chances are you’ve had a defensive conversation with finance about the AWS bill. Maybe it looked a little something like this… Unfortunately, this scenario is all too familiar, yet understandable from Finance Frank’s point of view. He’s just trying to do his job, but has zero context into which engineering activities are costing the organization so much (or why these costs are variable on a month-to-month basis).

Worth a Look: Public Grafana Dashboards

There are countless Grafana dashboards that will only ever be seen internally. But there are also a number of large organizations that have made their dashboards public for a variety of uses. These dashboards can be interesting to browse, giving you an insider’s peek into how real Grafana users set up their visualizations, with actual live data to boot. Perhaps some of them will inspire you to get to work on your own Grafana?