Many of us hate our backup environments. That’s because backups kind of suck, even with a backup product as great as IBM Spectrum Protect. As I said in another post, it’s the thing that everyone needs, but no one cares about, and most definitely can make your life crappy. Ask any backup admin, and I know they’ll agree. Go ahead; I’ll wait. Yep, they said the same thing, didn’t they?

AWS Step Functions is a service that abstracts distributed applications into state machines, with each state representing a component of an application. Not only does this automatically generate an architectural diagram of your application’s workflow, it also makes it straightforward to reorder your states as well as implement parallel execution, retries, and other tasks.

Running systems in production involves requirements for high availability, resilience and recovery from failure. When running cloud native applications this becomes even more critical, as the base assumption in such environments is that compute nodes will suffer outages, Kubernetes nodes will go down and microservices instances are likely to fail, yet the service is expected to remain up and running.

The Django Python framework allows people to build websites extremely fast. One of its best features is the Object-relational mapper (ORM), which allows you to make queries to the database without having to write any SQL. Django will allow you to write your queries in Python and then it will try to turn those statements into efficient SQL. Most of the time the ORM creates the SQL flawlessly, but sometimes the results are less than ideal.

Cloud Logging is a popular tool to help developers, operators, and other users identify and find the root cause of issues in their infrastructure. With features like the Logs Explorer, you can quickly and efficiently retrieve, view, and analyze logs. To help you get the most out of your logs, we’re excited to introduce suggested queries in Cloud Logging to help highlight important logs, so you can start analyzing and troubleshoot issues quickly.

A monitoring system is a shared tool. It’s useful for teams to operate from the same source of information, since subjective opinions can lead insights astray, especially when troubleshooting systems and network issues. You need a single source of truth. A monitoring dashboard with drill-down capability is a basic tool for any NOC staff. Often displayed on kiosks or wall-mounted in the Network Operations Center (NOC), dashboards let you know at a glance whether anything needs attention.

Application performance management (APM) involves managing the availability and efficiency of software applications by obtaining and translating IT metrics into business outcomes. Because application performance hiccups are inevitable, it’s crucial to have a robust APM solution in place so IT teams can resolve problems faster and more efficiently, lessening the impact on users and the bottom line. One factor muddling application performance optimization is the speed of change.

When it comes to delivering the very best services to your customers, consistency is essential! That’s why many businesses choose to implement a service monitoring tool that will enable them to get greater control over their services. As one of today’s leading network and server monitoring softwares, Pandora FMS is here to share some of the benefits of service monitoring.

Welcome to the Serverless world. One of the first things you’ll hear about is AWS Lambda - and you’ll continue to keep hearing about it! While architecture can be serverless without Lambdas involved, it’s very often the key component within a serverless application. In the first post of this 3-part AWS Lambda Handbook series, we run through what is AWS Lambda, dialling back to basics with the various terminology, how to create a Lambda function and how to run it.