Governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) are major inhibitors for organizations moving to the cloud—and for good reason. Cloud environments are complex, and even a single misconfigured security group can result in a serious data breach. In fact, asset misconfigurations were the leading cause of cloud security breaches in 2019. This puts a lot of pressure on developer and operations teams to properly secure their services and maintain regulatory compliance.

When your application experiences an outage, the tools your team uses to manage its response can make all the difference in how quickly they resolve the problem and avoid it in the future. An effective incident management workflow depends on accessible, integrated tools as well as clear, direct channels of communication. And, even after the matter’s been resolved, documentation and analysis of an outage is vital to ensuring it never happens again.

Today, at Dash 2020, we unveiled new products and features on the Datadog platform that provide engineering teams with even deeper visibility into their distributed applications and infrastructure. With these additions, Datadog further streamlines every step of your release cycle, from shift-left testing in your CI/CD pipelines to profiling your code in production.

As organizations build out their serverless footprint, they might find themselves managing hundreds or thousands of individual components (e.g., Amazon S3 buckets, Amazon DynamoDB tables, AWS SQS queues) for just a single application. At the same time, performance issues can crop up at any of these points, which means that having access to detailed observability data from your serverless functions is crucial for effective troubleshooting.

As cloud providers and infrastructure technologies grow their support for Windows containers, developers who use the Windows ecosystem are more and more able to enjoy the benefits of containerization. It’s quicker and easier than ever to modernize and deploy applications that use Windows-specific frameworks like .NET. Plus, Windows developers can use orchestration services like Kubernetes, Amazon ECS, or Docker Swarm to manage the complexity that containerized environments introduce.

If you are familiar with OpenTracing and OpenCensus, then you have probably already heard of the OpenTelemetry project. OpenTelemetry merges the OpenTracing and OpenCensus projects to provide a standard collection of APIs, libraries, and other tools to capture distributed request traces and metrics from applications and easily export them to third-party monitoring platforms.

When you’re on call and get paged at an inconvenient time, you need to be able to quickly determine the seriousness of the issue and act decisively to reduce system downtime. But pager notifications often don’t give you the information you need to investigate an issue from your mobile device, meaning that access to a laptop at all times is a must.

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is a service for ingesting, processing, and loading data from large, distributed sources such as clickstreams into multiple consumers for storage and real-time analytics. AWS recently launched a new Kinesis feature that allows users to ingest AWS service logs from CloudWatch and stream them directly to a third-party service for further analysis.