AWS’s new Graviton3 EC2 instances are built on its third generation of custom Arm-powered processors. These instances promise up to 25 percent better performance over Graviton2 for compute-intensive workloads. This means that, for applications like distributed data analytics, machine learning, video encoding, gaming, and more, migrating to Graviton3 instances can provide better performance, cost savings, and more energy efficiency.

This week we released v5.0 of StackState’s observability and AIOps platform, which introduces a rich set of new capabilities. Our latest release contains a little something for everyone responsible for reliably running business critical workloads in dynamic environments – SREs, DevOps, central platform teams, even business teams – and for new and existing users alike.

For the vast majority of organisations, some form of round-the-clock cover is critical to successful business operations. On-call is an essential part of an effective incident response process, yet there is no commonly accepted playbook on how to most effectively structure and compensate on-callers. We ran a survey to uncover the mysteries of how on-call works in organisations of different shapes and sizes around the world.

Morph is a new database migration tool designed to improve Mattermost schema migrations. It can be used programmatically with a library and from a CLI. Morph stores the schema version in a table, where all applied migrations are persisted. It’s a flexible open source library that can be used with a driver interface implementation and a source to read migration scripts from. The engine uses a dependency injection pattern so that any implementation can be used with the library.

Virtual desktops solutions – including Spot PC, Windows 365 , Azure Virtual Desktop – rely on directory services to authenticate users and provide access to assigned resources. For many years, traditional Active Directory instances have provided these services. With modern cloud based virtual desktops this configuration has created complexity and challenges, most related to the fact that Active Directory originated on-premise and contained many configuration options over the years.

Sometimes it may not be easy to debug Azure Functions deployed on Azure since we cannot do inline debug through the Azure Portal. An option for us is to write information to the Logs console in key parts of our code to get insights into what’s happening inside our Function. We can do that using the following sentence: Another option, especially if we are developing our Azure Functions inside Visual Studio, is to run the Function locally.

Devops is tough, but the choice between faster development and improving reliability shouldn’t be. Consider shifting-left security, better observability, AIops platforms, and more.

Earlier this year we released our report on the cost of cloud. Through this white paper we discovered the complexities of cloud costs for businesses and alternatives beyond the hyperscalers. This white paper saw 1,000 cloud developers surveyed about the management of their cloud services, and the degree of costs associated with it. From this analysis, we were able to come up with 5 key takeaways outlining the degree to which hyperscalers are overpromising and under-delivering.

Distributed caching is an important aspect of cloud based applications, be it for on-premises, public or hybrid cloud environments. It facilitates incremental scaling, allowing the cache to grow and incorporate the data growth. In this blog we will explore distributed caching on cloud and why it is useful for environments with high data volume and load.

As cloud technology has matured, hybrid and multi-cloud approaches have become commonplace. Enterprises have discovered that not all applications are suitable for the public cloud, meaning on-premise data centres are still active, and each public cloud has its own strengths and weaknesses, driving businesses to mix-and-match to suit their needs. This results in interoperability challenges for multi-cloud environments.