Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

One of the basic ingredients of any software is that before you deliver it to the end user you want to make sure that it works properly. The question is how we need to adapt our approach to testing to take account of the cloud-based, highly distributed nature of serverless architecture.

Like many startups, Stackery is a small team. For this reason, employees often need to go beyond their official job title to ensure everything gets done. As the Stackery product matures and gains more exposure, we’ve seen an increase in customer support inquiries and decided to further refine our customer support process through the creation of a customer support rotation that rotates amongst the software engineers on a weekly basis.

Load balancers play a key component in any cloud-based deployment. By distributing incoming traffic across backend servers or services, load balancers help improve responsiveness and increase the availability of your applications. Monitoring load balancers is important for analyzing traffic patterns and troubleshooting performance and availability issues.

Vydia is dedicated to helping creators gain more control over their audio and video content with a centralized tool for distributing, managing, protecting, and optimizing AV files. Vydia’s software team describes themselves as a “DevOps team first and foremost” delivering new features and updates in a tight loop. They are always in search of new ways to improve and modernize the development process.

Last week, our CTO, Todd Kesselman, presented on "Driving AWS Infrastructure Insights into Kafka" in downtown Vancouver, Canada. In his presentation, he revealed an unobtrusive way to share a wide range of operational information between organizations in a way that can easily be incorporated into your event pipeline. The featured technology is the AWS Event Bus. To clarify, the Event Bus is a message bus that enables multiple AWS accounts to publish and receive events to and from each other.

AWS Lambda has a cool feature that can be both a blessing and a nightmare for a serverless application, depending on whether it’s properly handled by our code: the retry behavior. A retry occurs when an invocation of a Lambda function results in an error and the AWS Lambda platform automatically invokes the function again, with the same event payload. Before we get deeper, make sure you are familiar with the AWS documentation on the subject.

Back in 2017, I wrote a post titled “3 pro tips for Developers working with Kinesis streams”, in which I explained why you should avoid hot streams with many Lambda subscribers. When you have five or more functions subscribed to a Kinesis stream you will start to notice lots of ReadProvisionedThroughputExceeded errors in CloudWatch.

If you’re a cloud architect or engineering lead, chances are you’ve had a defensive conversation with finance about the AWS bill. Maybe it looked a little something like this… Unfortunately, this scenario is all too familiar, yet understandable from Finance Frank’s point of view. He’s just trying to do his job, but has zero context into which engineering activities are costing the organization so much (or why these costs are variable on a month-to-month basis).