Welcome to above the clouds

GCP – Scalable tech support via AI-augmented chat
As Googlers transitioned to working from home during the pandemic, more and more turned to chat-based support to help them fix technical problems. Google’s IT support team looked at many options to help us meet the increased demand for tech support quickly and efficiently. More staff? Not easy during a pandemic. Let service levels drop? […]

Azure – HB-series Azure Virtual Machines will be retired by 31 August 2024
Transition to new HPC virtual machines by 31 August 2024. Read More for the details.

Azure – NC-series Azure Virtual Machines will be retired by 31 August 2022
Transition to new HPC virtual machines by 31 August 2022. Read More for the details.

GCP – Using Compute Engine: Users’ top questions answered
Compute Engine lets you create and run virtual machines (VMs) on Google’s infrastructure, allowing you to launch large compute clusters with ease. When it comes to getting started with Compute Engine, our customers have lots of questions—but some questions come up more often than others. We looked at an internal list of the most popular […]

GCP – How to conduct live network forensics in GCP
Forensics is the application of science to criminal and civil laws. It is a proven approach for gathering and processing evidence at a crime scene. An integral step in the forensics process is the isolation of the scene without contaminating or modifying the evidence. The isolation step prevents any further contamination or tampering with possible […]

GCP – Use Process Metrics for troubleshooting and resource attribution
When you are experiencing an issue with your application or service, having deep visibility into both the infrastructure and the software powering your apps and services is critical. Most monitoring services provide insights at the Virtual Machine (VM) level, but few go further. To get a full picture of the state of your application or […]

GCP – Five do’s and don’ts of multicloud, according to the experts
Do you want to fire up a bunch of techies? Talk about multicloud! There is no shortage of opinions. I figured we should tackle this hot topic head-on, so I recently talked to four smart folks—Corey Quinn of Duckbill Group, Armon Dadgar of Hashicorp, Tammy Bryant Butowof Gremlin, and James Watters of VMware—about what multicloud […]

Azure – Azure Blob storage – Inventory generally availability
Administrators can enable a daily or weekly inventory to be created to gain understanding of their blobs and containers. Read More for the details.

AWS – Amazon EC2 customers can now use ED25519 keys for authentication during instance connectivity operations
Starting today, AWS customers can use ED25519 keys to prove their identity when connecting to EC2 instances. ED25519 is an elliptic curve based public-key system commonly used for SSH authentication. Read More for the details.
AWS – AWS Transfer Family expands compatibility for FTPS/FTP clients and increases limit for number of servers
AWS Transfer Family now supports configuring a client side externally accessible IP address on an FTPS/FTP server, allowing clients behind a firewall or a NAT router to connect to the server. Additionally, customers can now easily scale up their workloads by creating up to 50 servers within AWS Transfer Family in a single AWS account […]