In 2009 AWS (Amazon Web Services) introduced a new EC2 pricing model known as reserved instances. In exchange for an upfront commitment of 1 or 3 years, reserved instances offer significant cost savings (anywhere from ~29% up to 72%) on cloud compute resources compared with on demand instances. Today, other cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform also offer similar pricing constructs. In this article you will learn.

You know the feeling. You’ve just deployed a new version to production and are monitoring the Rollbar dashboard for any new errors or looking out for any Slack notifications. You’re keeping an eye on the number of new or reactivated errors, their severity level, and triaging to see which errors need to be assigned and to whom. Now what if you could automate these tasks?

When monitoring third-party applications with Prometheus, you’ll need an exporter if the application doesn’t already expose metrics in the appropriate format. How do you find an appropriate exporter, and once you have your exporters, how should you organize your label taxonomies to reflect your infrastructure? Many applications in the systems you’re in charge of will be third-party applications, which do not natively expose Prometheus-formatted metrics.

We’re very excited to announce that Ansible roles to deploy StackStorm have been promoted to new major version 2.0.0! There has been a lot of activity recently on the ansible-st2 repository, with 4 releases in the last couple of months. Ansible can now be used to deploy StackStorm on more modern operating systems and with newer third-party applications.

AWS Activate is a program that provides startups with free AWS credits. There are specific requirements startups must meet in order to qualify, and not all startups that qualify end up receiving the free AWS credits. Still, for any startup planning on running their app in AWS, it’s probably worth a try. AWS Activate has two packages: the Founders package and the Portfolio package.

PostgreSQL is an open source database known for its reliability and performance. It’s used across many industries and applications, and is especially a favorite of web developers. All major web frameworks support PostgreSQL natively, from node.js and Django to Rails and Spring, so its adaptation is relatively broad across the internet for site backend systems. As with any database, developers need tools to work with them. Pgweb is an open source, web-based client for PostgreSQL.