Blue Sentry was engaged to help streamline systems for a provider of data monitoring services in the cloud. Blue Sentry’s engineers spent months working with their client’s internal team to help support a Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach. During one of the regularly scheduled cadence calls, it was mentioned that the client’s development teams needed to be able to spin …
Start-up Value Streams: The Secret to Speed
Achieving product market fit is perhaps the hardest part of building a successful start-up. Unfortunately, it is also the one thing without which a start-up cannot succeed. The speed with which you can achieve product market fit determines whether you run out of capital before getting traction in the market. And, the speed with which you can refine that fit …
Blue Sentry Ensures Security and Compliance
Security is on everyone’s mind these days. If you are responsible for managing an IT environment or deploying new products, security is likely a critical consideration for your company. Of course, the daily headlines about security breaches and new threats would unsettle even the most seasoned IT manager. At Blue Sentry, security is built into everything we do — even …
How Managed Services Can Simplify Cloud Security
Whether you are already one of the millions of active customers of Amazon Web Services (AWS), or are considering if you should migrate your organization’s workloads to the cloud, you’ve more than likely questioned the general security surrounding the platform. While cloud providers like AWS are responsible for maintaining the security of the cloud itself, it is up to your …
A Well-Architected Operation Begins with the Right People
Achieving high availability, robust disaster recovery, agility and cost savings are all reasons to adopt a next-generation, automation-based approach to operations. This is what Blue Sentry’s managed “DevOps as a Service” is all about. We encourage our clients to restrict human access to production environments as much as possible, while establishing a unified change management process and automation pipeline in …
How to Gain Real Savings Through a Proper Cloud Setup
The Problem While reviewing a customer’s AWS bill recently, I noticed line-item entry for $14,298 on their bill for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud NatGateway. That’s a lot of money being spent on internet traffic to and from their account. The AWS NatGateway has not only an hourly charge of $0.045/hour, but also a usage charge of $0.045/GB Data Processed. As …
How to Scale from Zero to $9 Billion in Under 4 Years
I have personally enjoyed watching the Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge that we know as “S.L.A.C.K.” move from being a tool known only to engineers, to fundamentally disrupting well-established business tools like email. Now that Slack has made a big splash among market watchers with its $9 billion valuation and acquisition suiters like Amazon, Google and Microsoft, news …
Dispatch from re:Invent, Day Two: Partners Pump Lifeblood into AWS Cloud
What do superhero Band-Aids, and millions of people attending the victory celebration for the World Series champion Chicago Cubs, have in common? Both have optimized for success through the AWS Cloud using an AWS Partner company, according to Terry Wise, vice president at AWS and the host of the Global Partner Summit, part of the massive AWS re:Invent gathering going …
Deploying Swagger-UI to S3 using Terraform
I use Terraform by Hashi Corp. almost exclusively — not just for standing up entire environments, but also for continuous deployment of EC2 instances, Lambda functions, and even static S3 websites. Recently, I was asked to host the Swagger UI on a private s3 bucket. I immediately started writing a reusable Terraform module for this job. The purpose of this …
Your Happy Herd Lives In the Cloud: Why Next-Generation Managed Services Makes Sense for Your Enterprise
Say you’re a rancher. Now, for most of you reading this blog, you will have to use your imagination to picture life on the open plains, proudly riding your cattle herd and knowing that your livelihood depends upon these beefy, bountiful steeds. Somewhere along this journey, you’ll be faced with a critical decision: One of your prized cattle has come …