If you’re a CFO or finance leader at a company that uses public cloud services like AWS, chances are you’ve had a bill cross your desk that may seem confusing. You or your team of financial analysts may have frequent conversations with engineering about how AWS services are allocated across different engineering initiatives.

The last decade has ushered in a golden era of software engineering. The rise of cloud computing freed companies from managing their own data centers and provided on-demand scaling. These services allow for provisioning servers on the fly using configuration and code. Treating that task as just another type of software development led to the advent of DevOps.

Ansible is an automation tool for provisioning, managing, and deploying infrastructure and applications. When building large-scale applications, Ansible enables users to manage and configure their infrastructure across platforms like AWS. Whether you rely on temporary or dedicated hosts, you can use Ansible to create a repeatable process for configuring them with the Datadog Agent.

Load balancing, traffic management, authentication and authorization, service discovery — these are just some of the interactions taking place between microservices. Collectively called a “service mesh”, these interconnections can become an operations headache when handling large‑scale, complex applications. Istio seeks to reduce this complexity by providing engineers with an easy way to manage a service mesh.

Amazon CloudFront is a CDN that allows you to serve content from edge locations without having to actually stand up infrastructure around the world. However, since it’s a managed service, you have less visibility with traditional monitoring tools. As such, it becomes even more important to take advantage of the available monitoring tools in AWS. In this post, we’ll explain how to use CloudWatch to monitor CloudFront and what is important to watch.