Application performance monitoring (or APM) is the practice of taking key application performance indicators to ensure system availability, improve system performance, and improve the end-user experience. This week we announced Amazon CloudWatch Application Signals, a new set of features built-in to Amazon CloudWatch to help you speed up troubleshooting, reduce application disruptions, and operational costs, so that you can deliver the best experience for your end users. This blog will discuss the top new features that you can use to improve observability in your application workloads. Applica ..read more

The rapid growth of generative AI brings promising new innovation, and at the same time raises new challenges. At AWS, we are committed to developing AI responsibly while enabling customers to provide assurance regarding the security of their environment to regulators and auditors. AWS Audit Manager announces the first version of AWS best practices framework for generative AI that automates evidence for Amazon Bedrock. With this framework, customers can now harness the full potential of generative AI while addressing concerns around ethical and responsible usage. AWS Audit Manag ..read more

The AWS Well-Architected Tool (WA Tool) helps you define and review workloads based on the latest AWS architectural best practices. This allows you to consistently identify areas of strength and improvement in your workloads. During a Well-Architected review, you answer questions to evaluate your architecture and receive an improvement plan detailing any high or medium risk issues discovered, along with a corresponding set of remediation steps to remove risks and optimize the workload. In 2021, Custom Lenses were introduced as a new feature in the AWS WA Tool. Custom Lenses allow customers to ..read more

AWS Config is a service that tracks configuration changes of AWS resources in your AWS account or across your AWS Organizations. AWS Config uses the configuration recorder to detect changes of your resources and track them as configuration items (CIs). Given the increasing complexity of cloud infrastructure, the number of resource configuration changes being made has grown exponentially. Workloads are becoming more dynamic in nature as they involve creating, updating, and deleting resources over short time intervals. In the past, configuration recorder only supported continuous recording which ..read more

Today, we are happy to announce that AWS CloudTrail Lake data is now available for zero-ETL analysis in Amazon Athena. AWS CloudTrail Lake is a managed data lake for capturing, storing, accessing, and analyzing user and API activity on AWS for audit, security, and compliance purposes. CloudTrail Lake allows you to easily aggregate activity logs across your AWS accounts through integration with AWS Organizations.  Amazon Athena allows you to query data stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and other data sources making it a powerful tool for compliance and security related activitie ..read more

AWS Trusted Advisor continuously evaluates your AWS environment using best practice checks in the categories of cost optimization, performance, resilience, security, service limits, and operational excellence and recommends actions to remediate any deviations from AWS best practices in the AWS Well-Architected Framework. AWS Well-Architected Framework is a collection of architectural best practices and guidance to help customers design, and build cloud workloads effectively. On 26th October 2023, Trusted Advisor added a new operational excellence check category and integrated with AWS Config t ..read more

Introduction Many enterprises rely on AWS to host the entirety of their infrastructure due to the inherent advantages of cloud computing. However, some enterprises operate mission critical workloads from remote areas at an increased risk to lose external network connectivity. For instance, a research facility located in a remote desert, an oil rig in international waters, or a military base in the remote Pacific. In this blog post, we will explore six best practices when designing for disaster recovery for these remote sites with limited external connectivity using AWS services. These enterpri ..read more

A Gartner, Inc. survey revealed that 87% of business leaders expect to increase their organization’s investment in sustainability over the next two years. This blog aims to equip Information Technology (IT) teams with the necessary resources to start the conversation with business leaders and prepare a compelling business case that highlights the opportunity for carbon footprint reduction through IT transformation. Organizations are diligently working on their sustainability strategies, with a primary focus on reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and achieving carbon neutrality. As IT organ ..read more

Independent software vendors (ISVs) are AWS Partners who build products or services using AWS. Their workloads are typically diverse and require a flexible and customizable multi-account setup. Following are some examples: Backoffice workloads, which tend be deployed once and are then regularly updated, typically relying on commercial off-the-shelf software. Presales workloads, which are short lived and tailored to a particular opportunity. Research and Development workloads, which have specific technical requirements like testing compatibility of products with a particular feature of a cloud ..read more

Observability describes how well you can understand what is happening in a system, often by instrumenting it to collect metrics, logs, and traces. To achieve operational excellence and meet business objectives, you need to understand how your systems are performing. In order to accomplish this, many customers use Amazon CloudWatch to get real-time monitoring, alerts & alarms, along with customizable dashboards to visualize tailored metrics which can help drive business decisions. Organizations have the ability to leverage custom widgets, which is a CloudWatch dashboard widget that can call ..read more