Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The struggle for better cloud visibility is common amongst software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies. SaaS applications are more complex than on-premise solutions by nature — there is a lot more surface area to consider. Distributed and multi-tenant systems are inherently more complex. Distributed systems, as often found in cloud architectures, are generally scaled out horizontally much more so than traditional single instance applications.

Every company exerts some level of effort to manage costs, performance, and risk in their hybrid cloud environment. But to ensure that those activities are performed consistently and efficiently across the board, you need a framework of policies, processes, controls, and tracking. In other words, you need cloud governance.

Creating a DevOps workflow to optimize application deployments to your Kubernetes cluster can be a complex journey. I recently demonstrated how to optimize your local K8s development workflow with Rancher Desktop and Skaffold. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can watch it by viewing the video below. You might be wondering, “What happens next?” How do you extend this solution beyond a local setup to a real-world pipeline with a remote cluster?

The addition of Amazon Web Services and VMware to the Defense Department’s milCloud 2.0 contract will make it easier for agencies to transition applications and services to the cloud. However, the acceleration of this effort may bring its own challenges. MilCloud is a substantial operation, with more than 1,200 virtual servers as of early 2021. The addition of AWS and VMware will allow agencies to add to this number, making an already complex service even more challenging to manage.

Today, I was working on our Terraform Provider, and I noticed that I never tried to deploy an application from scratch on a new and clean AWS account. Meaning, an empty AWS account - with 0 resources created. No VPC, no EC2, no Load Balancer, nothing... just an IAM user to get access to my AWS account programmatically. This post explains what I did and how it took 37 minutes and 33 seconds to literally: 😅 Let's explain all of that!

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an AWS-managed service. It is used by startups, small & mid-sized businesses for web application development. As it comes pre-configured with EC2 server and is efficient at using automatic provisioning of services and resources, handling application code and environment configurations seems easier with this PaaS solution. AWS Elastic Beanstalk is a go-to option for various startups, small & mid-sized businesses.