Until a few years ago, if you did any kind of searching for control planes, you would have found results related to traditional networking concepts. With the advent of cloud computing — including hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, and cloud-native — we’re seeing a lot of tools starting to adopt a “control plane for 'X'” terminology. We’ve heard this term applied to — among other things — Kubernetes. More on that later.

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.

Thousands of customers leverage the official Elasticsearch Service (ESS) on top of Elastic Cloud to get the best experience for running Elasticsearch — including all of Elastic’s exclusive products such as Elastic Logs, Elastic APM, Elastic SIEM, and more.

Hey, there. This is part four of the Elastic SIEM for home and small business blog series. If you haven’t read the first, second, and third blogs, you may want to before going any further. In the Getting started blog, we created our Elasticsearch Service deployment and started collecting data from one of our computers using Winlogbeat. In the Securing cluster access blog, we secured access to our cluster by restricting privileges for users and Beats.

API Gateway is a serverless service by AWS to expose cloud services through private or public HTTPs endpoints. It is used by many serverless teams to connect frontend applications to backend systems in a secure, scalable and seamless way. API Gateway integrates with Lambda, DynamoDB, S3 and a variety of other AWS services. The main issue with API Gateway, so far, was its cost. At $3.50 per million requests, it can be more expensive than Lambda itself.

We did a compilation of all announcements from the AWS re:Invent 2019 that are relevant for Serverless teams, broken down by services.

Up until now, DynamoDB has been the only option of a truly serverless database battle-tested for production environments. Especially after launching the on-demand throughput capacity optimization, is a perfect-fit database engine for serverless projects.

Selenium is a well renowned automation testing framework used extensively for cross browser testing. The open source testing tool is a smart choice for companies offering software testing services for automation testing of different web applications across browsers such as Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge. Selenium offers extensive competition, compared to different test frameworks like HP Unified Functional Testing and Quick Test Professional.

When Opsgenie and Slack team up, incident management is smoother and more intuitive. With this powerful integration, users are enabled to rapidly respond to and resolve alerts directly from Slack, using buttons or /genie commands to mute notifications, get alert details, view on-call schedules, and much more. Here are some best practices to help teams avoid alert fatigue but always stay informed.

Grafana annotations are great! They clearly mark the occurrence of an event to help operators and devs correlate events with metrics. You may not be aware of this, but Grafana can automatically annotate graphs by querying Loki. Here’s a look at how to use this feature. Loki queries can be used to automatically generate annotations on Grafana dashboards since 6.4.0. For every log line that is returned from a query, the text is automatically displayed as an annotation at the appropriate time.