Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Step Functions is a managed service by AWS that implements the Finite-state Machine (FSM) model. You coordinate multiple AWS services into serverless workflows so you can build and update apps quickly. Using Step Functions, you can design and run workflows that stitch together services such as AWS Lambda and Amazon ECS into feature-rich applications. You can read Wikipedia’s definition of a Finite-state Machine, but I think you’ll like the next section more. Keep on reading.

We know a lot of you are on vacation so we’ll keep this month’s State of Robotics edition short and sweet. Looking for an easy way to get familiar with ROS 2? We recently published a few helpers on how to simulate robots with turtlesim to help our readers get a rolling start on ROS2. For something that carries a little more punch, follow our tutorial on simulating a TurtleBot3.

Quick, do you know what code is currently deployed to production? How about staging? How far apart are these environments? Sleuth tracks your deployments, and today, Sleuth is launching first-class environments support. I'm going to show you how it works, steps to take to migrate your existing projects, and where we plan to take it in the future.

In this post, we learn how to use tasks in combination with checks for monitoring with InfluxDB.

Every process on the net is a logical journey, including the Google blacklist – even when it’s done in error. Nothing kills profits like losing your web traffic; so here’s all you need to know about blacklists, how to avoid them, and – if your site is branded with a red warning banner – how to get off them.

Kubernetes has a lot of features and deployment options for running containers. One of these is the DaemonSet. In this blog post, we’ll discuss what a DaemonSet is, what it can be used for, and how to create and update them.

We’re happy to announce a new version of AppSignal for Node.js, and support for instrumenting Apollo Server v2+. This means that we’ll save you more some time, and perform more automatic instrumentation for you.

Elastic Container Service (ECS) is the fully managed container orchestration service by Amazon. Combined with Fargate, Amazon’s serverless compute engine for containers, you can run your container workload without the need to provision your own compute resources. But how can you consolidate and query all of your logs and metadata for these workloads? Enter Loki, the log aggregation system from Grafana Labs that has proven to increase performance and decrease costs.

Like many industries, the pharmaceutical industry is undergoing a rapid transformation powered by technology. These technologies allow companies to improve business operations and empower the innovation needed to be competitive in today’s market. For pharmaceutical companies, time to market a new product can be costly and time-consuming. In this complex and regulated industry, it can take over a decade to bring a new therapy to market, while costs can total over $2 billion.

Learning how to monitor etcd is of vital importance when running Kubernetes in production. Monitoring etcd will let you validate that the service performs as expected, while detecting and troubleshooting issues that could take your entire infrastructure down. Keep reading to learn how you can collect the most important metrics from etcd and use them to monitor this service. etcd is a foundational component of the Kubernetes control plane.