Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As I approach my first anniversary at Mattermost as a Senior Technical Writer, it’s fun to look back on what has been an empowering year of daily technical learning. When I joined Mattermost, I was new to many of the processes and tools used by the team: A year in, I’ve now introduced, led, and supported enhancements across all of these areas, and more! I’d like to introduce you to our product documentation tech stack and share some key learnings we’ve adopted.

AWS CloudFormation is a service that enables you to create and provision AWS infrastructure deployments predictably and repeatedly. This helps you leverage AWS products such as EC2 instances, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon SNS, Elastic Load Balancing, and Auto Scaling to build highly reliable, highly scalable, cost-effective applications in the cloud – without worrying about creating and configuring the underlying AWS infrastructure.

A number of improvements have been made to the Puppet Report Viewer add-on for Splunk since it was initially released. The most notable changes added in version 3.1 of the add-on are the tracked metrics, allowing for better troubleshooting of performance issues in your Puppet installation.

Building on the success of SQL Clone in delivering copies of SQL Server databases at speed, we’re bringing cloning to Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL. As we launch an early access program, we would like to invite you to gain first access to our newest database cloning technology and input into our roadmap. Adding support for other RDBMS is a big deal as we look to extend our market-leading Database DevOps solutions to more teams, but that’s not the only major feature.

For any company working in the cloud or using managed cloud services to create products, cloud costs represent a significant expense. If you lead an engineering team, you may have to defend your bill to your CEO or CFO. But here’s the challenge: Cloud costs can be difficult to communicate because engineers and executives often think about cost from different perspectives. As an engineer, you may think of costs in terms of AWS services, such as EC2 instances, storage, etc.