How to Keep Up with Cloud Vendor Updates

The Latest in the Cloud Computing Industry

Keeping up with cloud vendor updates from a single provider — let alone multiple vendors — can feel like a full-time job. Thankfully there are websites and cloud experts who alert you of the biggest and most important announcements, and keep tabs on the latest cloud news for you. We hope this list can help you stay in-the-know about changes to your cloud vendors.
Check them out and bookmark your favorites! Feel free to submit your favorites and we can add them to this list.

Last Week In AWS

Cloud: Amazon Web Services
Why You Should Read It: Corey Quinn is a well-known blogger and speaker who delivers facts and opinions with an extra dose of snark. Keep up with AWS news at Last Week In AWS.

Jeff Barr

Cloud: Amazon Web Services
Why You Should Read It: Jeff Barr is the number one blogger for AWS and has been there since the early days. He still delivers cloud news with the enthusiasm of Day One. Read Jeff Barr’s AWS blog.

The AWS Blogger

Cloud: Amazon Web Services
Why You Should Read It: Jon Myer is a video blogger for AWS and his videos include DeepRacer (Machine Learning robotic car races) as well as interviews with AWS experts. Check out The AWS Blogger.

Azure Weekly

Cloud: Microsoft Azure
Why You Should Read It: Sometimes you want an independent source for your cloud news. While Endjin, the people behind Azure Weekly are a Microsoft Partner, their weekly email focuses on what you need to know and is straight to the point. Get the latest news at Azure Weekly.

GCP Weekly

Cloud: Google Cloud
Why You Should Read It: Google also gets an independent weekly roundup, thanks to GCPweekly.com. This is great thanks to short tidbits with links for more details. Stay in the loop with GCP Weekly.

ChannelE2E

Cloud: All
Why You Should Read It: ChannelE2E is an authority on MSPs and the Cloud. Get must-read content for Cloud Service Providers at ChannelE2E.

How to Manage Your Cloud Vendor Updates…

Paying attention to cloud vendor updates from a single provider is challenging enough. If you are a multi-cloud shop, multiply that by two or three, and it’s nearly impossible to stay on top of all of the changes coming from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Yet many cloud architects and developers try to do just that. At CloudCheckr, we continually find organizations using internally-developed tools, often Microsoft Excel spreadsheets or Google Sheets, to manage virtual assets like Reserved Instances. Not only are such handmade tools prone to error, they quickly become out of date.

When a provider rolls out a new instance type or size, there is a scramble to update those tools. Or worse, the new instances go ignored even though they could offer enhanced performance and often at a lower cost. Either personnel time is wasted by adapting to these changes or the benefits of those changes aren’t achieved. In both scenarios, there is a measurable penalty to “rolling your own.”

… And Manage Your Cloud

At CloudCheckr, we invest an industry-leading percentage of our budget towards Research and Product Development. Our job is to insulate our customers from the numerous turbulent changes IaaS providers make on a monthly basis, and as a result our new architecture.

CloudCheckr dedicates an industry-leading percentage of our budget to Research, Development, and keeping up with the cloud providers. Our new architecture, CloudCheckr CMx, is purpose-built to accept data from multiple cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Google, etc.) and display the results in a modern, responsive user interface.

Ideal for DevOps

The new CloudCheckr CMx platform is built using our new API (Application Programming Interface) which means if a customer prefers to develop their own tools, they can do so without having to worry about keeping up with the changes from the cloud vendors. That layer is abstracted so script writers can access the data and reports they need for financial, security, compliance, inventory and utilization use cases, without having to update their code every time a cloud provider makes a change.

Up to Date and Maintenance-Free

Another consideration is whether you have to install and maintain a self-hosted solution versus leveraging a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) offering. A SaaS solution is always up-to-date and maintenance-free. Some SaaS offerings, like CloudCheckr, are also Agent-less, which means there’s nothing to install within your instances or containers, so you don’t have to worry about security or performance issues from a third party Agent.

Reports You Need

While many CMP solutions have built-in reports, some of the best insight comes from custom reports. CloudCheckr CMx includes Pivot Explorer, an integrated Business Intelligence tool, at no extra charge. Users can analyze service usage, filter the data in a variety of ways, and generate interactive charts in real-time. Unlike a third-party BI tool, there is no need to export and format the raw data. It’s all built-in.

Automation

Another benefit of an integrated solution is automation. While a spreadsheet can make a suggestion, CloudCheckr CMx’s automation capabilities mean you can act on those suggestions, with the click of a button. If your AWS instance should be “right sized” to a smaller or larger instance size, or even a different instance family, just click a button to “make it so!”

Ultimately, the only way to keep up with cloud vendor updates, at scale, is to automate and leverage an always-up-to-date solution, like CloudCheckr.

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