Introduction
With Amazon and Microsoft ramping up their cloud offerings every day and warring for data warehouse space all over the country (and the planet), the cloud is only going to continue growing. But have you actually transitioned to using cloud-based solutions?
Whether it is database offerings, third party encrypting tools, or some other service you have integrated into your application since you started building systems, there is an almost 100% certainty that you could ditch the third party offering for a cloud-based solution that is easier to integrate and more seamlessly managed.
Let me give you a quick example from my career.
CloudWatch vs. Nagios
For the first 4 years of my career as a developer and systems administrator, Nagios was the tool of choice for system monitoring. Not necessarily my tool of choice, but the tool of choice for the industry in which I work and the teams I was on.
Now don’t get me wrong, I love Nagios. I am a Linux system admin so setting up the spider web of configurations and plugins, customizing how my dashboard looks, and setting up reporting and alerts is like a fun puzzle for me. But it can take even an experienced engineer multiple days to get Nagios up and running and configured perfectly.
When I started working more with cloud technologies I, like many, was a little wary of stepping away from my Linux terminal and my Nagios dashboard in favor of letting AWS do it all for me. But once I made the switch life got way easier.
Installing and setting up the CloudWatch agent takes no time at all and there is something inherently simple and beautiful about the dashboard and logs being accessible in the same portal in which you do all of your other work – you can launch a new instance, check the status of your database backup, and run a query in /var/log/messages for that error keyword all in the same web portal.
Getting to the Point
Ok so CloudWatch is easier to use than Nagios – so what? Well my point when I started writing this blog was to show you that you may not be as cloud-focused as you think: what database do you use? What is your process for domain name registration? Are you still using Dropbox? What about GitHub or JIRA?
All of these services are provided in AWS and Azure and it would be highly beneficial for you and your project team to consider migrating to use the whole host of services your cloud provider has to offer. If for no other reason than ease of use, you will find great benefit in trusting in the services the cloud has to offer.
Bottom Line
The bottom line is that if you are using AWS or Azure as glorified VMware, you are doing it wrong. You may be thinking to yourself: “this blog would have been very timely in 2012, but come on, it is 2020, everyone uses CloudWatch!” My only answer to that is boy would you be surprised what technologies people out there are still clinging to.
Do you even cloud, bro?
Please let me know if you have any questions! [email protected]