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As businesses increasingly migrate their applications and infrastructure to the cloud, ensuring resiliency becomes paramount to maintain service availability and minimize disruptions. Resilient cloud architectures are designed to withstand failures and recover quickly from disruptions, offering enhanced reliability and performance. This article provides an overview of resiliency patterns and trade-offs that can help architects build efficient and robust cloud solutions.

In today's cloud computing landscape, cost optimization plays a crucial role in maximizing the value of your infrastructure. Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a range of services to help users achieve cost efficiency, and one such option is leveraging Graviton processors for Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service). You can save up to 10% in RDS compute costs by switching from x86 to Graviton processors. We cover the advantages and things to consider on this post, and how Stream.Security can help determine where you can make this switch.

The Sustainability pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework focuses on integrating sustainability considerations into the design, development, and operation of cloud workloads. This includes reducing the environmental impact of IT operations, promoting sustainable practices, and providing tools and resources to measure and report on sustainability performance.

‍The Cost Optimization pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework provides guidance on how to design and operate workloads in the cloud to optimize costs. It helps organizations identify opportunities to reduce costs, eliminate waste, and improve efficiency without sacrificing performance, security, or functionality. The Cost Optimization pillar is focused on helping organizations achieve maximum business value by minimizing costs and maximizing returns on cloud investments.

The Performance Efficiency of the AWS Well-Architected Framework is focused on optimizing the use of computing resources to meet performance requirements and efficiently deliver business value. This includes understanding workload requirements, selecting appropriate resource types, and monitoring performance to identify opportunities for optimization and cost savings.

‍The Reliability pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework focuses on designing and operating reliable and resilient systems in the cloud. It involves building systems that can automatically recover from failures, scale to meet changing demands and maintain availability in the face of disruptions. The Reliability pillar also emphasizes the importance of testing, monitoring, and continuously improving systems to ensure they meet the needs of the organization.

The Operational Excellence pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework is focused on designing and operating systems to deliver business value by enabling continuous improvement of people, processes, and technology. It involves having well-defined processes, procedures, and automation to manage changes and respond to events, while regularly reviewing and refining these processes to optimize operations. Learn about the design principles. best practices and how Lightlytics can help achieve operational excellence on AWS.

IAM roles for service accounts provide a secure and efficient way to manage access to cloud resources in a cloud environment. By assigning roles to service accounts instead of individual users, organizations can improve their security posture by minimizing the risk of human error or credential misuse.

IAM plays a crucial role in securing access to resources in an AWS EKS cluster, therefor it’s important to have a strong understanding of IAM (Identity and Access Management) to effectively troubleshoot any issues that may arise.

Service Control Policies (SCPs) in AWS offer a robust mechanism for preserving security standards, which is essential for compliance and averting security breaches.

When deploying workloads to EKS, it is important to ensure that appropriate access control is in place to protect resources and data. This is where IAM roles and policies come into play. IAM roles and policies in Amazon EKS are used to define and manage permissions for Kubernetes resources running in an EKS cluster. IAM roles are used to grant access to AWS resources and services, while Kubernetes policies are used to grant access to Kubernetes resources.

The Cluster Autoscaler in Kubernetes is a component that dynamically resizes the cluster according to the workload. In Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), the Cluster Autoscaler optimizes resource utilization and cost by scaling down nodes during periods of low demand and scaling up when demand increases.

In AWS, finding idle resources involves monitoring and analyzing resource usage to identify underutilized resources. This helps optimize resource allocation, cut costs, and improve system efficiency. AWS provides native tools like CloudWatch, Trusted Advisor, and Cost Explorer for idle resource detection. Alternatively, Lightlytics offers a more user-friendly and scalable solution with advanced search capabilities and architectural standards.

Nobody likes surprise increases in their AWS bill. To help you avoid surprise bills, we just released our AWS cost anomaly detection capability. This capability is designed to help you stay on top of your evolving AWS costs, and alert you when there are anomalies compared to previous spend.With AWS cost anomaly detection, you can always remain in control of your cloud spending and can take action to optimize your resources whenever necessary.

Lightlytics can help you optimize your cross-communications network traffic, allowing you to achieve a high-performing, scalable, and cost-effective AWS architecture that meets the needs of your business.

Amazon MSK provides a fully managed service for Apache Kafka. Here are 9 practices to reduce MSK costs on AWS including using auto-scaling, choosing the right AWS instance type, using provisioned storage, enabling compression and 5 more.

RDS (Relational Database Service) is a cloud-based database service that's fully managed service, easy to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. Like all consumable services, you can implement best practices to reduce your AWS RDS costs. Here are 10 way to reduce this cost, including using RIs, Spot instances, autoscaling and 7 more.

EC2s are at the core of AWS deployments and can typically account for up to 45% of your AWS bill. Implementing cost best practices for EC2s pays dividends!We cover the 10 best practices to reduce AWS EC2 costs including choosing the right instance type, making use of ARM and AMD CPU types, choosing the correct volume types, saving plans.

One of the biggest challenges of cloud computing is managing costs. Democratizing cloud cost troubleshooting helps share responsibility and foster ownership of costs among the teams that use cloud services. Our customers report up to 25% reduction in their AWS bills after using our cost troubleshooting capabilities.

Reducing the cost of AWS NAT Gateways is essential for optimizing the budget for your cloud infrastructure. AWS NAT Gateways play a crucial role in enabling communication between instances in private subnets and the internet, but the cost of using them can add up quickly. In this hands-on guide I’ve covered several best practices to reduce the cost of your AWS NAT Gateways. By following these best practices, you can reduce the cost of your AWS NAT gateway and optimize your cloud infrastructure budget.

In this hands-on guide, we’ll show you how you can migrate your EBS gp2 volumes to gp3 to lower your AWS disk costs by up to 20%.

Elastic IPs are charged an hourly fee even if they are not associated with any running instances, or if they are associated with a stopped instance or with a network interface that is not attached to any running instance. Associating more than one Elastic IP with an instance adds additional charges. Releasing any unassociated Elastic IPs that are no longer needed can help reduce your monthly AWS bill. Lightlytics offers an easy and scalable way to find and manage Elastic IPs with advanced search capabilities and architectural standards.

Old EBS snapshots that are no longer referenced are called orphaned snapshots.You can find and delete these to reduce your AWS bills. You can find orphaned EBS snapshots using AWS Console, AWS CLI, Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager. Alternatively, Lightlytics offers an easier and scalable way to find and manage EBS snapshots with advanced search capabilities and architectural standards.

We understand how difficult it can be to fully understand what total cloud costs are: direct and indirect costs, applied credits, auto-scaling. But you can't bury your head in the sand and ignore them - you have to look them straight in the eye!

Las Vegas here we come! AWS re:invent is happening in Las Vegas from November 28 - December 1, it's a celebration of everything we love, ingenuity, innovation, and forward thinking technologists. It is why we are proud to sponsor this tremendous event this year. AmazonWeb Services (AWS) provides the most mature and scalable public cloud service for your business today, we provide a Cloud Infrastructure change intelligence platform that solves the complexity of cloud management - we are as they say "better together". It is a classic case of the sum is greater than its parts.We have assembled a team of cloud complexity re:solvers that are going to attend AWS re:invent and spread our message of saving time, money and team burnout by making the cloud simple to manage.

Running complex computing systems requires technology to make it easier for developers and managers to operate and constantly improve their applications. Containers are extremely effective for enterprises as well as startups Gartner predicts that 70% of global organizations will be running more than two containerized applications by 2023. Using containers reduces deployment time, review cycles and upgrades security with the inherent isolation of the product.

In the previous hands-on we went over how you can predict the impact of proposed changes made with Terraform and prevent critical mistakes before deploying them with Lightlytics Simulation.In our next hands-on, we'll go over troubleshooting issues in one of the top most used AWS services: AWS Lambda.

Computing and production giants have realized that in order to predict outcomes in large-scale systems truly you need more than just a simulation. There are many definitions of a digital twin but the general consensus is around this definition "a virtual representation of an object or system that spans its lifecycle, is updated from real-time data and uses simulation, machine learning, and reasoning to help decision-making." By having better and constantly updated data related to a wide range of areas, combined with the added computing power that accompanies a virtual environment, digital twins are able to give a clearer picture and address more issues from far more vantage points than a standard simulation can, with greater ultimate potential to improve products and processes.

The costs of doing business in the cloud are, for a lack of a better word - cloudy. When analyzing Cloud costs there are more and more variables to consider. Our way of looking at this complexity is a holistic one, we enable a first-ever practice of real-time simulation to get "the big picture" context of IaC changes. The ability to look at your cloud posture from a different angle gives a broader more meaningful look at your cloud business costs. After years of Cloud Infrastructure experience, we can truly say that the most valuable resource and the one that costs the most is time. Our solution addresses cloud complexity head-on by allowing Cloud practitioners to see with context the effects of IaC changes and provide architectural standards whether community based or custom to keep your cloud strategy inline.

IaC Impact Analysis with Lightlytics Simulation Our simulation engine merges the current configuration state of your cloud in combination with the Terraform code proposed change, to determine how your cloud is going to be impacted if the code will be deployed, helping you prevent misconfigurations and eliminate critical mistakes before they are deployed by continuously simulating changes as part of the GitOps flow. Lightlytics comes out of the box with dozens of predefined best practices for Availability, Security, Compliance, and Cost. (Architectural Standards)Each best practice is validated every time a change is made.

We come from Infrastructure, we've been in the cloud trenches and here is our biggest conclusion: The cloud is a mess. At Lightlytics, our mission is to bring order into Cloud chaos, we do this by simplifying operations so the cloud becomes what it was always supposed to be - efficient and always optimizing. Before Lightlytics you needed to choose which complexity you wanted to tackle whether visibility, reliability, cost, security and more. Lightlytics provides clarity into your cloud enabling you to constantly improve your workflows and results.

If the cloud is a main point of business for you and running it efficiently is how you make more money you should know that you can have more visibility, control and most of all more development for your cloud buck. As a manager you have to know what to expect and how to plan for the unexpected, with Lightlytics connected to your IaC solution there is no unexpected or unknown, you can manage your business with the control you deserve - the responsibility is yours and you should have all the context to make a smart business decision.

We know that feeling, we come from Infrastructure we have sent down the pipeline and stressed over millions of lines of code and thousands of configurations. Just like you, we are cool-headed people but since we knew what could go wrong we would get to that place where we would stress over deployment. It’s natural really, when we don’t know what’s going to happen our mind goes into “flight” or “fight” mode which causes - you guessed it - stress. Deep Instinct released its annual Voice of SecOps Report which found that 45% of respondents have considered quitting the industry due to stress. Lightlytics was born out of the idea that instead of stressing, there must be a way to simulate and know precisely what is going on in our cloud in real-time.

Engineering teams are increasingly relying on Kubernetes for development and production workloads. When we combine Kubernetes with the cloud layers and all the inter and intra dependencies between, we get an extremely complex set of infrastructure under our control. Taking into account K8S workloads and Cloud changes is a complex process.

Using this capability, we allow cloud operation teams to incorporate their tribal knowledge into our system in the form of predefined and custom rules to ensure the collective experience of the team is taken into consideration for any configuration change at any time.

The new Lightlytics Atlantis integration enables the run the of a terraform impact analysis simulation as an Atlantis workflow, a new comment from Lightlytics will appear on every pull request with a full terraform impact analysis of the proposed change.

Today, we’re announcing our $30M Series A fundraising round, led by at Energy Impact Partners (EIP), with participation from Cervin Ventures, and our previous investors: Tlv Partners VC and Glilot Capital Partners VC. This fundraising round is a testament to the tireless work of our team, and the commitment to the vision we’re building.

There are a variety of techniques to deploy new applications to production, so choosing the right strategy is an essential decision. This is especially true when considering the techniques in terms of the impact changes may have on the system and on end users. And What About Configuration Changes?

Don’t assume an outage will never affect your region. A region outage can completely knock out your services and critically affect your business application’s availability for a certain period--especially if your application is built around a single-region architecture.

IaC minimizes the need for dedicated server admins on a larger scale too. Instead of having multiple admins to handle specific parts of a cloud environment, everything can be managed — in an entirely automated way — by one engineer. VMs and cloud instances can be created and maintained simply with several lines of code. In addition, IaC directly helps reduce costs through automation, and it helps reduce risks by lowering the chances of errors, and enables greater speed by reducing the deployment times.

In today's world, wherever nearly every business is an internet business that dependents on code, downtime has a direct impact on the business we all care about.

We have built a platform that enables DevOps to Automatically predict, pre-empt and prevent downtime, data loss, deployment delays and other critical business disruption caused by infrastructure changes by simulating all possible dependencies and their impact on operations before deployment, we can proactively ensure that production continues as planned, so you can create assurance in your infrastructure.