Amazon SQS is a message queuing service that allows you to send and receive huge numbers of messages from a queue using a simple API. Using Amazon SQS, without setting up any infrastructure, you can have a distributed and fault tolerant queuing system. Since SQS is a managed service, you have less visibility with traditional monitoring tools. As such, it becomes even more important to take advantage of the available monitoring tools in AWS.

If you’re using AWS Kinesis in your application, you’ll want to monitor your Kinesis streams to make sure they are healthy and that your producers and consumers are interacting with them correctly. CloudWatch exposes many metrics that can help you determine the health of your Kinesis streams, but it can be a pain to set up. In this post, we’ll discuss the metrics that are most helpful, how to get CloudWatch up and monitoring your Kinesis streams, plus an easier alternative.

A lot of engineers think a project is done once the code is live. In a perfect world, that could be true—alas, commits are rarely free of problems. For companies that have a lot of focus on dev but little on ops, this can quickly turn into a nightmare. Fortunately, there are a lot of infrastructure monitoring tools out there that can help marry DevOps and keep your apps, websites, and processes running smoothly.

Have you noticed recently that your AWS Lambda invocation requests are getting throttled? If so, your Lambda functions are probably not running as designed. Let’s examine the possible causes and solutions to poor Lambda performance.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is pretty much ubiquitous these days, with everyone from tiny startups to large enterprises using the cloud service to run their apps, websites, and processes. For small businesses, being able to predict your budgets is paramount. Unfortunately, AWS costs can be very difficult to forecast. In this blog, we’ll go over the pros and cons of the tools available to help you estimate your AWS costs.