Figuring out monitoring in a holistic sense is a challenge for many companies still, whether it is with conventional infrastructure or new platforms like serverless or containers. In most applications there are two aspects of monitoring an application: System Metrics such as errors, invocations, latency, memory and cpu usage Business Analytics such as number of […] The post Logging and Monitoring ...

While at 2nd Watch, I’ve had the opportunity to work with a plethora of CIOs on their journey to the cloud.  Some focused on application-specific migrations, while others focused on building a foundation. Regardless of where they started, their journey began out of a need for greater agility, flexibility, extensibility and standardization. Moving to the […] The post 10 Ways Migrating to the Cloud ...

Today we are excited to announce we have earned an AWS Certification Distinction for achieving more than 200 active AWS Certifications! We have invested significant time and resources in education to validate the technical expertise of our staff with AWS certifications, enabling our cloud experts to better serve our clients across the US. This distinction […] The post 2nd Watch Earns AWS Certifica...

The Why In my last post we went over why we’d want to go the CI/CD/Automated route and the more cultural reasons of why it is so beneficial. In this post, we’re going to delve a little bit deeper and examine the technical side of tooling. Remember, a primary point of doing a release is […] The post Fully Coded And Automated CI/CD Pipelines: The Weeds appeared first on 2nd Watch.

When IT organizations adopt infrastructure as code (IaC), the benefits in productivity, quality, and ability to function at scale are manifold. However, the first few steps on the journey to full automation and immutable infrastructure bliss can be a major disruption to a more traditional IT operations team’s established ways of working. One of the […] The post How We Organize Terraform Code at 2n...

Welcome to our Customer Cliff Notes, a video series highlighting customer projects we've recently worked on, including technical details. We migrated this retailer's eCommerce app to AWS to provide the scalability and reliability it needed to meet customer demand during the busy holiday shopping season.

Welcome to our Customer Cliff Notes, a video series highlighting customer projects we've recently worked on, including technical details. We helped the world's 2nd largest auto manufacturer migrate to the cloud with cross-region replication.

The cloud is an exciting place, where the realization of instant implementation and execution of enterprise applications and workloads at scale is achieved. As we move to utilize the cloud we tend to utilize already existing applications and operating systems that are baked into the cloud service provider’s frame. Baseline images and cloud virtual machines […] The post Assessing your cloud environ...

Welcome to our Customer Cliff Notes, a video series highlighting customer projects we've recently worked on, including technical details. SCOR, a reinsurance company, partnered with us to create a secure, SOC2 compliant environment on AWS to meet its security regulations.

We recently took a DevOps poll of 1,000 IT professionals to get a pulse for where the industry sits regarding the adoption and completeness of vision around DevOps.  The results were pretty interesting, and overall we are able to deduce that a large majority of the organizations who answered the survey are not truly practicing […] The post So You Think You Can DevOps? appeared first on 2nd Watch.

Welcome to our Customer Cliff Notes, a video series highlighting customer projects we've recently worked on, including technical details. We built a big data analytics platform on AWS for the world's largest beverage manufacturer to give them insight into their business and make better-informed decisions.

Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) is a standard framework that helps to drive organizations towards a common set of goals and principals. The overarching theme is strategically focused on how technology utilization and operations tie directly back to an organization’s business goals and, in many cases, aspirations. There are many facets to GRC. In the […] The post Governance, Risk and Complian...

Welcome to our Customer Cliff Notes, a video series highlighting customer projects we've recently worked on, including technical details. We engaged with one of the largest toy manufacturers in the world to optimize its AWS environment and costs and increase its governance and security standards.

With increased focus on security and governance in today’s digital economy, I want to highlight a simple but important use case that demonstrates how to use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) with Security Token Service (STS) to give trusted AWS accounts access to resources that you control and manage. Security Token Service is an extension of IAM and […] The post How to Use AWS IAM with STS...

Welcome to our Customer Cliff Notes, a video series highlighting customer projects we've recently worked on, including technical details. We helped Condé Nast migrate 300 instances and applications to AWS in just 12 weeks, saving the company over 40% in costs.

I love an all you can eat buffet. One can get a ton of value from a lot to choose from, and you can eat as much as you want or not, for a fixed price. In the same regards, I love the freedom and vast array of technologies that the cloud allows you. A […] The post Managing Azure Cloud Governance with Resource Policies appeared first on 2nd Watch.

Welcome to our Customer Cliff Notes, a video series highlighting customer projects we've recently worked on, including technical details. We helped Yamaha save $500,000 annually by closing down its data center and moving all of its applications, including Microsoft workloads, to AWS.

Welcome to our Customer Cliff Notes, a video series highlighting customer projects we've recently worked on, including technical details. We provided a High Performance Computing solution to allow one of the largest insurance companies in the world to run batch computing jobs and spin up 1000s of cores, instantly, to run risk modeling jobs.

Welcome to our Customer Cliff Notes, a video series highlighting customer projects we've recently worked on, including technical details. We automated the provisioning of AMIs for one of the largest fast food companies in the world, reducing its time 75% while maintaining governance & security.

Welcome to our Customer Cliff Notes, a video series highlighting customer projects we've recently worked on, including technical details. Find out how we designed and implemented a better analytics platform that could scale in the cloud for this fortune 500 global hotel, vacation club and resorts corporation and the benefits they've gained from it.

There is a feature in the Linux Kernel that is relevant to VM’s hosted on Xen servers that is called the “steal percentage.”  When the OS requests from the host system’s use of the CPU and the host CPU is currently tied up with another VM, the Xen server will send an increment to the […] The post Corrupted Stolen CPU Time appeared first on 2nd Watch.

Welcome to Full Disclosure, our new video blog series with expert technical tips and tricks for navigating the world of the cloud. In our first vlog we discuss what DevOps is, what the origins of the method and term are and how you can start. At 2nd Watch, we define DevOps as a cultural change. […] The post Full Disclosure Vlog: Dispelling the Myths of DevOps appeared first on 2nd Watch.

What is DevOps, what are the origins of the method and term and how do you start? We define DevOps as a cultural change.

In this post, we’ll go over a complete workflow for continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) for infrastructure as code (IaC) with just 2 tools: Terraform, and Atlantis. What is Terraform? So what is Terraform? According to the Terraform website: Terraform is a tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently. Terraform […] The post CI/CD for Infras...

Picking up where we left off… In my previous blog I gave a fairly high-level overview of what automated AWS account management could (or rather should) entail. This blog will drill deeper into the processes and give you some real-world code samples of what this looks like. AWS Organizations and Linked Account Creation: As mentioned […] The post Automated AWS Organizations and Linked Account Creati...

Compliance is a constant challenge today. Keeping our system images in a healthy and trusted state of compliance requires time and effort. There are millions of tools and technologies in market to help customers maintain compliance and state, so where do I start? Amazon has built a rich set of core technologies within the Amazon […] The post Utilizing Amazon Systems Manager to ensure systems are s...

What does that even mean? What I am talking about here is the automation of the following: – AWS Linked Account Creation (the creation of secondary accounts under a single master account) – Account Initialization and Configuration – Continuous Compliance It is commonplace for organizations to manage their AWS assets/resources across a wide range of […] The post Automated AWS Account Management app...

Why do it? Alexa gets a lot of use in our house, and it is very apparent to me that the future is not a touch screen or a mouse, but voice.  Creating an Alexa skill is easy to learn by watching videos and such, but actually creating the skill is a great way to […] The post Creating a simple Alexa Skill appeared first on 2nd Watch.