AWS security groups act as a virtual firewall for your EC2 instances to control inbound and outbound traffic.

"Security groups act at the instance level, not the subnet level. Therefore, each instance in a subnet in your VPC could be assigned to a different set of security groups." -  AWS Documentation

There is no doubt that as we continue to move further into cloud architecture and infrastructure our environments are evolving daily. This rapid pace of change is failing to keep up with the expectation that your team knows "how it works" and "what it looks like". Keeping network diagrams up to date is often the last thing on most engineers mind, until the time you need them which in some cases is too late.

Manual creation and updating of diagrams are tedious and time-consuming and not that effective with continuous change. These days we have the ability to automate the process of generating and drawing a diagram, getting the information straight from the source of truth.

Sydney’s wild weather brought down an availability zone in AWS’s AP-SOUTHEAST-2 Region on Sunday night.

Websites went down, customer service calls went up, twitter went nuts, engineers scrambled to find work arounds and management started asking “Why?”. 

If your website crashed, you know by now that it’s probably because your application wasn’t designed for region failure.

One outage should not be reason for you to start thinking that the cloud isn’t right for you, or that you should move service providers. But it should make you revisit your architecture. 

Failure in cloud services is inevitable regardless of your provider. Outages happen so you must design for failure. Your actual infrastructure availability is irrelevant to your application availability. 100% uptime should be achievable even when your cloud provider has an outage regardless of its size.

Come see us at the AWS Startup Pavilion

AWS has invited Hava to be part of the AWS Startup Pavilion on Day 1 of the AWS Sydney Summit. Having attended AWS Summits and conferences for years, it’s exciting to be on the other side demoing Hava.

If you're registered for Summit, we'll be at the Startup Pavilion on Wednesday so come over and say hello. We’d love to step you through Hava and show you how we can save you time and headaches visualizing your AWS cloud infrastructure clearly.

How confident are you with your cloud infrastructure?

How are you currently creating your cloud diagrams? Are you spending quality time with your whiteboard hand drawing them? Or are you trolling through your AWS console, then clicking and dragging in a drawing tool?

Imagine being able to extract real-time diagrams of your actual AWS environments. That would be pretty cool, right?

Well that’s exactly what Hava does!

With DevOps now firmly placed in the enterprise sights, we are seeing that automation visibility is becoming critical. Having the view of the state of the delivery pipeline ensures there is an increased awareness of the system as a whole. The question that often arises is “Yes, we need monitoring, but what do we monitor?” There are numbers components of your environments that you should be monitoring, and this blog explores what they are, how to track changes in your cloud environment and why it’s important to monitor them.