Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

At AWS re:Invent today, Dr. Werner Vogels, VP and CTO of Amazon.com, announced a partnership between AWS and Grafana Labs, resulting in the Amazon Managed Service for Grafana, a scalable managed offering that provides AWS customers a native way to run Grafana directly within AWS alongside all their other AWS services. We’d like to give a big thanks to the whole Grafana community. Not only have they inspired us with so many great use cases, but they help us build better software every day.

Microsoft Azure and Microsoft, in general, has a history of being seen as designed for big enterprises only. Those days are in the past. Azure is working its way to the front of the pack for cloud services. It is easy to transition your workflows to Azure because it connects well with other Microsoft tools you use. Even though it is a smoother transition, it is just as complex and complicated as other large cloud providers.

As companies adopt container technologies, they face a significant challenge - how do we secure this new attack surface? It’s an issue that you often see backlogged in favor of solving storage, networking and monitoring issues. Add on the challenge of educating the workforce on one of the fastest-growing open source projects to date, and it’s no wonder security has lagged as the primary focus for teams.

Cloud environments are always susceptible to security issues. A significant contributor to this problem is misconfigured resources. Traditional IT Infrastructure was somewhat static; server hardware only changed every few years. With few changes occurring, security was also more static. The modern cloud environment is a much different challenge. In cloud environments, servers, services, and storage are created with automation, resulting in a dynamic and potentially ever-changing server environment.

In 2020 ‘pivot’ has become the trendy word of the business class, referring mainly to a company’s willingness to adopt technology to maintain internal team communication and productivity. Apart from front-line workers across disciplines who have courageously put others before themselves to provide healthcare and daily necessities, shelter in place, and work from home orders forced businesses to reassess their needs…and quickly.