Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

It is very important to create backups for your crutial EC2 instances. While AWS provides mechanisms to increase availability, the cloud is not infallible. EC2 provides a native backup format for your EC2 instances in the way of AMI images. But storage costs of the AMI images can build over time.

AWS announced AWS Lambda Extensions back in October 2020 and I wrote extensively about it at the time – what it is, how it works, and why you should care. In short, Lambda Extensions allow operational tools to integrate with your Lambda functions and run either in-process alongside your code or in a separate process. To better understand the problems they solve and their use cases, please read my previous article.

Today, almost every service now is offered in a “Cloud” variant. But what does that really mean? Are all clouds services equal? It’s easy to see why so many vendors rush to add a Cloud edition/variant of established software they sell. Undoubtedly, there has been a move to Cloud services across the industry, as more and more organizations seek to take advantage of the higher reliability and lower total cost of ownership that Cloud platforms promise.

A big part of ensuring the availability of your applications is establishing and monitoring service-level metrics—something that our Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team does every day here at Google Cloud. The end goal of our SRE principles is to improve services and in turn the user experience. The concept of SRE starts with the idea that metrics should be closely tied to business objectives. In addition to business-level SLAs, we also use SLOs and SLIs in SRE planning and practice.