Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

If you have ever had the need to store large amounts of files and data, then Azure’s Blob Storage is made for you. Microsoft’s Azure Cloud provides huge benefits with not only their fantastic services, locations, availability and support, but also in their almost seemingly infinite capacity. Azure Blob Storage is not only scalable, durable and almost always available it also provides flexibility to scale as your business requirements need.

Now that you’ve chosen to go the serverless route, which vendor option should you go for? That’s one of the major questions that anybody asks themselves when they make the switch. Should you choose Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is a mature service that will serve you well, or should you go with e Google’s younger Firebase? Before the comparison of AWS vs Firebase, we should understand what serverless really means. This one server can be responsible for several different functions.

With nearly every organization moving at least some portion of their infrastructure into the cloud, the value is well understood—we’re not going to re-hash those umpteen benefits here. But when you migrate, you cede some control. That’s by design and it’s not inherently bad. It does, however, mean that you need to keep an eye on those deployments to make sure you’re getting the performance and benefits you expect. And you need to watch it over time as things evolve.

In Part 1 of our Complete AWS Lambda Handbook for Beginners, we gave a refresher on the fundamentals of AWS Lambda and what is AWS Lambda. In this post, we’ll look at AWS Lambda pricing, some interesting Lambda facts and examples of great AWS Lambda use cases in your serverless application.

Event Hubs are a big data streaming PasS capability provided by Azure. Event Hubs can process data or telemetry produced from your Azure environment. They also provide us a scalable method to get your valuable Azure data into Splunk! Splunk add-ons like the Splunk Add-on for Microsoft Cloud Services and the Microsoft Azure Add-on for Splunk provide the ability to connect to, and ingest all kinds of data sources from your Azure environment.

So much has been written about Lambda cold starts. It’s easily one of the most talked-about and yet, misunderstood topics when it comes to Lambda. Depending on who you talk to, you will likely get different advice on how best to reduce cold starts. So in this post, I will share with you everything I have learned about cold starts in the last few years and back it up with some data.

One of the most frequent questions customers ask is “how do I find this in my logs?”—often followed by a request to use regular expressions in addition to our logging query language. We’re delighted to announce that we recently added support for regular expressions to our query language — now you can search through your logs using the same powerful language selectors as you use in your tooling and software!

As more and more organisations dive into Azure, storage consumption continues to grow and so does the cost to businesses. Azure offers almost a limitless supply of storage, but this comes at a cost so it’s important to know exactly where that storage is going. There are a few ways to get this information, either via the Azure portal, Azure Storage Explorer or even PowerShell. However, all these tools have limitations and to be honest, rather lacking and not that straightforward.

To get some serious work done, we usually need to prepare for it. “Baby steps first,” they say. In our niche, these “baby steps” would be countless small jobs that need to be done before we can start with our main project. Proper preparation(try saying this 5 times fast) is the key to success, but after we’ve achieved our primary goal, there will always be something to do to keep it steady and flowing.