Looking forward to be back as a speaker at DevOps Pro Europe next May. This year I will cover cost optimization on the cloud: “Watch Your Wallet! Cloud Anti-Patterns that Make Your AWS Bill Skyrocket”. See you at #DevOpsProEurope!
Watch Your Wallet! Cloud Anti-Patterns that Make Your AWS Bill Skyrocket
Should you really always run your cluster in multiple availability zones? How can a transition rule to Glacier double your storage costs? You want to monitor and understand your data transfer costs, where should you start? Why are backups eating my database budget? What, one more storage class on S3? Following so-called “best practices” works only when you fully understand the implications, costs included. We will address a few cloud anti-patterns, making your bill smaller and your deployment better.
From backup on GCP to geolocation on AWS, from licenses changes at Elastic to healt bots at Microsoft: a recap of the news articles I wrote for InfoQ in January 2021.
Google Cloud Introduces Filestore Backups
Google Cloud has recently introduced a preview in all regions of Filestore Backups, a new product to simplify the migration of file-based applications to the cloud.
AWS Introduces Location Service in Preview
In one of the latest announcements of re:Invent 2020, AWS introduced the preview of Amazon Location, a new mapping service for developers to add location-based features like geofencing and built-in tracking to web-based and mobile applications.
AWS Introduces Amazon Managed Service for Grafana and Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus
In one of the latest announcements of re:Invent 2020, AWS introduced the preview of Amazon Managed Service for Grafana (AMG), a managed Grafana that automatically scales compute and database infrastructure, with automated version updates and security patching. In a related but separate announcement, AWS also introduced a preview for Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus (AMP), a Prometheus-compatible monitoring service for container infrastructure and application metrics for containers.
AWS Transfer Family Introduces Support for EFS
AWS has recently introduced support for Amazon EFS file systems as a data store in the AWS Transfer Family, the managed service that handles SFTP, FTP and FTPS requests. The new option is intended to simplify the migration to the cloud of file transfer workloads.
Microsoft Introduces Azure Health Bot
Microsoft recently introduced Azure Health Bot, an evolution of Microsoft Healthcare Bot that is becoming an Azure service with added functionalities. Built for developing virtual health care assistants, Azure Health Bot combines medical databases with natural language capabilities.
Cockroach Labs 2021 Cloud Report: GCP Outpaces Azure and AWS
Cockroach Labs recently released their annual cloud report identifying Google Cloud Platform as the best overall provider. The 2021 Cloud Report compares AWS, Azure, and GCP on benchmarks that reflect critical applications and workloads.
Elastic Changes Licences for Elasticsearch and Kibana, AWS Forkes Both
Elastic recently announced licensing changes to Elasticsearch and Kibana, with the company moving away from Apache 2.0 and adopting the Server Side Public License (SSPL) and the Elastic License. Amazon reacted with a plan to maintain a fork of both Elasticsearch and Kibana under the previous license.
Google Cloud Workflows Now Generally Available
Google has recently announced that Google Cloud Workflows, the service to orchestrate Google Cloud and HTTP-based API services with serverless workflows, is now generally available. Workflows Connectors are now in public preview.
All the news articles I wrote for InfoQ in December where related to AWS new announcements and the main cloud event of the month, including a final recap of AWS re:Invent 2020.
AWS Introduces Preview of Aurora Serverless v2
During the first keynote of re:Invent 2020, AWS announced the next version of Amazon Aurora Serverless in preview. The new serverless version for the MySQL 5.7-compatible edition of Amazon Aurora scales in fraction of a second and introduces multi-AZ support, global databases, and read replicas.
Amazon S3 Now Delivers Strong Read-After-Write Consistency
To guarantee higher availability and better performances, S3 has for years relied on an eventual consistency model. During the first week of re:invent, AWS announced that S3 now supports strong read-after-write consistency.
AWS Introduces New Instance Types for Amazon EC2
AWS recently announced new instance types for Amazon EC2 on different processors and for different EC2 families. Most of the new instances are already available, even if only in a subset of regions, others are expected by the end of the month.
Recap of AWS re:Invent 2020
This year the annual re:invent conference organized by AWS was virtual, free and three weeks long. During multiple keynotes and sessions, AWS announced new features, improvements and cloud services. Here is a review of the main announcements impacting compute, database, storage, networking, machine learning and development.
Yesterday I had the pleasure to talk live with Federico Razzoli, director & database consultant at Vettabase Ltd, about the future of CentOS and the alternatives. Which options do we have in the cloud and on AWS? Is it better to choose now one of the many “RHEL rebuild” or wait a few months to see which project or company is going to lead in this now empty space?
In October 2017 I presented for the first time at Codemotion in Berlin. Three years later, I designed and recorded my first course for them: “Cloud Computing: Come Creare una Applicazione Serverless” is a module of fourteen short lessons in Italian, just over two hours of video content plus exercises. The course uses a simple URL shortener as an example of a serverless application on AWS. It is now available on Codemotion and it is free!
I am taking three months off from public speaking to recharge my batteries and work on new content, but I will back on stage next February at CloudWorld 2021 to talk about cost optimization on AWS with a special focus on storage and data. This is a new topic I never covered before but that I am really passionate about. The title and abstract of my session at DeveloperWeek are below.
Learn how to manage better your costs on AWS, make your bill less scary or your credits last longer
Should you really always run your cluster in multiple availability zones? How can a transition rule to Glacier double your storage costs? I want to monitor and understand my data transfer costs, where should I start? Why are backups eating my database budget? What, one more storage class on S3? Following so-called “best practices” works only when you fully understand the implications, costs included. We will address a few cloud anti-patterns, making your bill smaller and your deployment better.
Looking forward to one more virtual conference in 2021!
From shipping containers at Azure to edge technology at Fastly, from new gateway load balancers at AWS to serverless migrations at BBC, a recap of the news articles I wrote for InfoQ in November 2020.
Amazon SNS Supports FIFO for Pub/Sub Messaging
AWS has recently introduced support for First-in-First-out (FIFO) topics in Amazon SNS with strict ordering and deduplication of messages. The new feature enforces ordering in which messages are sent and received, and avoids that a message is processed multiple times.
Cloud Computing in a Shipping Container: Microsoft Introduces the Azure Modular Datacenter
Microsoft recently announced a new Azure in a shipping container service called Azure Modular Datacenter. The new offer provides an option for setting up an Azure datacenter in hybrid or challenging environments where cloud computing previously would not have been possible.
AWS Introduces Nitro Enclaves, Isolated EC2 Environments for Confidential Computing
AWS has recently made available Nitro Enclaves, isolated EC2 environments to process confidential data. Based on a lightweight Linux OS, a Nitro Enclave is a hardened, attested and highly constrained virtual machine.
Fastly Expands Capabilities for Compute@Edge
Fastly, the cloud computing company providing solutions for edge cloud networks and content delivery networks, recently announced new features for their serverless compute environment Compute@Edge. The new release introduces new CLI functionalities, Terraform API support and additional language support.
BBC Online Going Serverless
In a recent article the BBC engineering team describes the work done moving BBC Online to the cloud and to a serverless deployment. Half of the BBC’s website is now rendered serverlessly with AWS Lambda.
AWS Announces Gateway Load Balancer
AWS Gateway Load Balancer is a new fully managed network gateway and load balancer. The service is tailored to deploy, scale and manage third-party virtual appliances such as firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems and deep packet inspection systems in the cloud.
