Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Another day of re:Invent is over and it’s all been amazing and overwhelming. And yes, the medals really do spin. It was a huge honor to be named an AWS Serverless Hero a few weeks ago. As I prepare for more conference talks in the upcoming months, I’m reflecting on what it means to be granted this honor despite having only written my first lines of code earlier this year.

Serverless computing continues to be a growing trend, with AWS Lambda as a main driver of adoption. Today, AWS released Provisioned Concurrency, a new feature that makes AWS Lambda more resilient to cold starts during bursts of network traffic. If you’re running a consumer-facing application, slow page loads and request timeouts can degrade the user experience and lead to significant revenue loss.

Acorn RISC Machine (Arm) processors were first released in 1985 to support low-power, low-cost computing. Because of their ability to deliver cost-effective performance, the next big use for Arm-based devices is in the cloud. AWS recently added a range of Arm-based EC2 instance types and is developing additional support (e.g., in Elastic Kubernetes Service). Meanwhile, Arm and Docker are working on tighter integration.

AWS Fargate has steadily gained traction in Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) environments because it allows users to run containerized applications without thinking about their underlying infrastructure. Today, AWS announced that support for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) on AWS Fargate is now generally available, giving Amazon EKS users the option to seamlessly manage their infrastructure with AWS Fargate instead of manually provisioning EC2 worker nodes.

We are pleased to announce the general availability of external collection for Elastic Stack Monitoring. With this announcement comes the ability to monitor Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash, APM server, and Beats all via Metricbeat modules. Using external collection, users now have the capability to collect and send monitoring data for their Elastic Stack without having to depend on the health of the monitored services.

The “serverless” movement is taking the industry by storm and now, with Datadog, you can start monitoring your serverless applications and functions on AWS Lambda. As soon as you enable the Lambda integration, you’ll start to see your metrics in an out-of-the-box dashboard like the one above. Monitor and alert on AWS Lambda serverless functions in minutes with Datadog.

G Suite is a collection of cloud-based productivity and collaboration tools developed by Google. Today, millions of teams use G Suite (e.g., Gmail, Drive, Hangouts) to streamline their workflows. Monitoring G Suite activity is an essential part of security monitoring and audits, especially if these applications have become tightly integrated with your organization’s data.

Authorization to Operate (ATO) in a day and on-going authorization are compliance nirvana. The ATO is the authorizing official’s statement that they accept the risk associated with the system running in production environments using live business data. The idea that all of the information necessary to make a risk decision is at hand and can be consumed by decision makers is what every compliance program is trying to achieve.

At Scout, we pride ourselves in building a tool that is focused on the developers’ ability to quickly identify performance issues within their applications so they can fix them and resume building the fun stuff. DreamFactory is a robust role-based access tool to help you with API creation and management needs.