Today we’re proud to announce that Stratus10 has been named a Top 20 Most Promising AWS Solutions Providers. Hailed as the leading source for helping CIOs and IT leaders make the right decision, CIO Review nominates and selects the winners based on their ability to build solutions and services that can effectively yet economically support an AWS solution offering. Read the Article

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What Is DevOps?

You are probably continually on the lookout for dynamic new ways to streamline your software productivity. In your research, you might have come across the concept called DevOps and wondered what it’s all about and how you can make it work for your team.

As a software development company in today’s highly competitive marketplace, where just about every business needs a mobile app and other proprietary software, you need to constantly search for ways to add speed and efficiency.

Managed Services is the practice of outsourcing management responsibilities to an expert party in order to improve operations, efficiency, and costs. More and more companies are starting to see the value of outsourcing the management of their cloud infrastructure to expert companies called Managed Service Providers (MSPs).

Even for someone who works with Amazon Web Services (AWS) on a daily basis, the pace and scale of new announcements coming from AWS can be daunting. For example, in 2016, AWS made 640 announcements covering a range of topics from price drops, new services, and even new features to existing services. We are only three-quarters of the way through 2017 and AWS has already exceeded that number and still going strong with re:Invent (Amazon's annual conference for all things AWS, with features keynote announcements, training and certification opportunities) still six weeks away.

Cost optimization is the main reason companies are migrating to the cloud. Managing costs once you're on the cloud, however, can be a completely different story. Managing costs on AWS is more of a continuous process requiring a balance of resource utilization and cost optimization.

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If you’ve been following technology news in recent months you’ve probably heard all the buzz about artificial intelligence and terms such as “machine learning” and “neural networks”. The truth is artificial intelligence has been around for a while. It is just being covered a little more in the news lately. One of the factors that have allowed artificial intelligence to be more relevant has been the public cloud. The advent of the public cloud has had an enormous impact on the advancement of artificial intelligence in recent years.

Hosting a website typically requires having a server to host it on, and if you need your website to handle a lot of traffic you will need multiple servers. However, if you have a static HTML website that does not require any data storage or dynamic content you can host it on Amazon S3 without having to pay for, or worry about, having any servers. In addition, you can use AWS’ Content Delivery Network, CloudFront, to make sure your website can handle a lot of traffic.

Now that most have recovered from the hangover of the PetyaWrap ransomware attacks, it is Monday morning quarterback time. PetyaWrap was not a new ransomware with a zero day vulnerability, but rather a combination of three common vectors of attack that companies do not always take seriously. But securing your assets go beyond just your servers (aka EC2 instances); you also need to ensure your AWS Account is equally as secure.

Most people start experimenting with AWS by creating a few EC2 instances and maybe some S3 buckets to get a small application going. Once you start understanding how things work in AWS and have enough knowledge to get a small proof of concept application up and running you start to feel that satisfaction and affirmation that moving to the cloud was the right decision. You then feel comfortable enough to start moving a few other things to the cloud without really thinking about how much you will be paying for them, until you get the bill at the end of the month.

Since this blog post was initially published, AWS has released new features available in the 3-tier infrastructure. Read the updated version here.

As part of the AWS Best Practices series of posts we will talk about various topics from migration to tagging to security. Here we will discuss the 3-tier architecture pattern.