Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The latest News and Information on Cloud monitoring, security and related technologies.

What in the world is FinOps, and why do we need it?

In 2020, cloud migration sped up by a factor of 24, according to McKinsey. Would you be surprised to learn there were a lot of factors driving that shift? Due to COVID-19, companies needed to go remote fast and securely. They wanted to lift the maintenance burden off overworked IT teams. And, in the face of the year’s worldwide economic uncertainty, motivation to take advantage of cloud’s cost savings was running high.

How to Take Data Stored in InfluxDB Cloud 2 and Use It in a "Switch" Node within Node-Red

This video shows you how to take data that is stored in InfluxDB Cloud 2 and use it in a "Switch" node within Node-Red. In our example, we read the average house temperature and decide whether or not the heating should be switched on.

How I Built a Data Discovery API for AWS Data Lake

This simple FastAPI service will help you find data in a data lake Data lakes provide a myriad of benefits. They are data agnostic and don’t require you to define a schema upfront. However, without a proper structure, it may be challenging to find the data that you need. In this article, we’ll address this problem by creating a FastAPI abstraction allowing us to query the AWS Glue metadata catalog.

The Hidden Costs of Your ELK Stack [VIDEO]

At first glance, there may seem to be little not to love about the ELK Stack. It’s open source. It’s free (if you set it up and manage it yourself, at least). It’s a widely used solution with a thriving ecosystem surrounding it. But if you’ve ever actually built and managed an ELK stack environment, you have probably found that the theory doesn’t match the reality. The ELK stack is full of hidden costs, and it often fails to deliver real value over the long term.

IAM Policies: Good, Bad & Ugly

In my last post we looked at the structure of AWS IAM policies and looked at an example of a policy that was too broad. Let's look at a few more examples to explore how broad permissions can lead to security concerns. By far the most common form of broad permissions occurs when policies are scoped to a service but not to specific actions.

Visualizing your CloudFormation Template with Stackery

Stackery can be used to create a new CloudFormation template or to quickly visualize an existing one. Code is automatically generated as you simply drag-and-drop resources on a graphical grid. The experience is much more intuitive than previous generation tools like AWS CloudFormation Designer. Stackery visualizes resources the way a human would perceive them, grouping related resources together.

HAProxy Forwards Over 2 Million HTTP Requests per Second on a Single Arm-based AWS Graviton2 Instance

For the first time, a software load balancer exceeds 2-million RPS on a single Arm instance. A few weeks ago, while I was working on an HAProxy issue related to thread locking contention, I found myself running some tests on a server with an 8-core, 16-thread Intel Xeon W2145 processor that we have in our lab. Although my intention wasn’t to benchmark the proxy, I observed HAProxy reach 1.03 million HTTP requests per second.

The great serverless cost debate (Serverless = Costless)

If you’re worried that switching to serverless infrastructure is too expensive for your business, you’re not alone. Total spending on cloud services will top $284 billion by 2024. The good news is there are many ways to track and lower your serverless operation costs without slowing down your business. Lambda and how can it help your business? Find out more by reading these Lambda frequently asked questions.