The Butterfly Effect of Uncontrolled Cloud Operations Change

The rapid development of SaaS applications in the cloud means more and more people, features and open source applications are combining together into one huge platform. Due to the immediacy of software development, a major challenge for software vendors is to audit changes in their application environments, such as system configurations. The problem is that any `change performed at any stage of an operation can impact other areas of an application. This digital butterfly effect can be very detrimental in today’s fast-paced, on-demand environment. It becomes even more destructive when these changes can’t be found, due to inadequate tracking. Failure to track changes, can greatly affect a company’s revenues and success.

A Real-Life Story

A company with a large scale SaaS platform that provides to large e-commerce, quality buyers started seeing that their revenues dropped about 12% from the previous day. The DevOps team started checking all of the platform components and logs to check for malfunctions. After 12 exhausting hours, they started searching for changes that were made over the past 36 hours and roll back these changes. Eventually, they found out that one of the analyst experts made a change to one of the campaigns.
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Modern IT Monitoring: API-Based and the Human Touch

Screenshot_1011Monitoring is what allows you to generate complete transparency of the online service that you’re responsible for, including cloud infrastructure, application functionality and SLA. Modern IT monitoring seems to be composed of two layers: an infrastructure layer and an application layer. On the infrastructure layer, VMs, network, and storage are monitored, revealing memory consumption, CPU utilization, and network connection metrics. On the application layer, database performance, browsing latency, and actual application functionalities, such as users registration, login and cart are monitored. For mega sites like eBay and PayPal, even the slightest latency can lead to a loss of millions of dollars. If your online service isn’t monitored closely, the trust and confidence of your users can be significantly compromised. In this post, I would like to touch on several points that describe the current state of the market, how essential it is to monitor your resources, and what monitoring is built on.
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Datapipe Acquires Newvem: My Take

newvem we analyze you optimize I began my journey in the world of cloud computing roughly about 9 years ago, leading cloud and SaaS products and development teams. Two years ago, as part of my position as Cloud Evangelist for Clicksoftware, I had the pleasure of meeting two progressive entrepreneurs, Zev Laderman and Ilan Naslavsky.  At that time, they had just begun developing cutting edge technology that supported AWS cloud users, optimizing usage and utilization. They had asked me to test this innovation, which was in its early alpha stage. So, being the optimistic and supportive early cloud adopter that I am, I immediately gave them the AWS keys (back then, you had only one option – the full right keys). Ilan, who came up with the idea, went over the AWS account Newvem’s analysis with me.  During his explanation, we came across a single Windows SQL EC2 instance that sat underutilized in the region of Japan.  Apparently, it had been running for nearly 5 months, resulting in approximately $6000 worth of Amazon operating costs. Eventually I managed to save around 40% of the AWS bill (tens of thousands of dollars).
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Newvem's April Webinar

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Dear IAmOnDemand reader, I would like to personally  invite you to join an interesting webinar that will take place this  Wednesday, April 3rd. 

As part of my job at Newvem, I have assembled a power-house panel of some of the top thought-leaders in cloud computing to discuss the importance of a healthy cloud, focusing on cost efficiency, risk tolerance, and resource optimization.
Moderated by my great cloud colleague Patrick Pushor, CTO and founder of  CloudChronicle.com, panelists include –

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