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A Health Dashboard is a single source one could visit to learn about the availability and operations of IT systems. Both AWS and Azure provide Health Dashboards that allow users to view the overall status of their services. They offer a public version as well as a version available to logged-in customers. Both companies automatically update their publicly accessible sites every few seconds and provide an RSS feed to allow alerts to be sent to subscribers' RSS readers. The portal addresses are https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status and https://azure.status.microsoft/ .  Besides active alerts, both services share a log of incidents that have taken place.  Every Azure incident has an ID. Azure is better than AWS when it comes to handling the aftermath of the incident. Azure incident management describes what happened, what went wrong and why, and how Azure responded. The report adopts the lessons learned approach by sharing what actions Azure is taking to reduce the risk an...

Imagine a company wants to commission a new application.  The application needs computing resources to be able to run. On many occasions the app references libraries, frameworks, software development kits (SDKs) and other software to run. The app and support programs are installed on a particular version of an Operating System (OS). To run, the solution requires resources such as CPU, memory, disk storage and networking. These are provided by physical servers. Virtualization lies between the Physical Servers and the OS and makes computing environments independent of physical infrastructure. A single app may require multiple virtual machines (VM). This may be necessary for redundancy purposes and/or because the application requires additional components that would be installed on separate VMs. Typically, the database used by the app or it web front end may reside on their own VMs. If this application was running on-premises one would...