As a result of the pandemic, we are all navigating an unpredictable mix of virtual, hybrid, and in-person conditions in our business and personal lives. This situation isn’t going away any time soon. The pandemic has prompted businesses across all industries to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives, where the cloud is critical. On-demand self-service environments provide a reason for cloud migration as cloud architectures help businesses reinvent and address uncertainties.

Delivering value to customers quickly and efficiently is critical to the success of modern businesses. Understanding the process and timeframe during which an organization generates new ideas and then designs, develops and deploys them is vital to success. At the recent Illuminate User Conference, Drew Horn, Director of Business Development, held a discussion with Clara Ko, Director of Engineering at Sauce Labs, and Bryan Veselka, Director and Product Owner for Cloud and Automation at Vizient.

We are living in a data world. Data describes and controls almost every aspect of our life, from the president's elections to everyday grocery shopping. Data grows exponentially and so does the complexity of applications that manage that data. We all know the recent shift to microservices and other revolutionary changes that happened in the way we design, develop, deploy and operate modern applications.

Over the past decade, the software development landscape has shifted dramatically. Long development cycles resulting in big releases are now a thing of the past. Instead, the focus is on delivering value to the customer quickly and efficiently through small releases delivered at a high frequency. This shift is not without its challenges. Increased release velocity means an increased threat to security and reliability. To combat this, teams must collaborate fluidly across the organization.

Consumers and users of applications expect near 100% availability and reliability to work, transact, collaborate, etc. There’s a lot of talk about monitoring the performance of the application itself, but what about the underlying systems and components supporting the app, and in particular the infrastructure it sits on? If any piece of this stack fails, it can negatively impact the user experience, and in turn, your business.

Technology environments are rapidly evolving as organizations look to remain competitive, accelerate innovation and make themselves more agile. But in the process, many of the observers, i.e., stakeholders who track infrastructure and application metrics, are falling behind, unable to monitor and manage modern, cloud-native apps and multi-cloud environments due to the complexity that comes with them.

Back in 2018, AWS first released its Graviton processor—their custom-built 64-bit Arm processor—and followed that with the release of Graviton2 processors just a year later. Now customers running ECS and EKS on EC2 can choose between X86 and ARM64 depending on which processor best fits their application workload.