Cloud State Monitoring

Last week I gave a presentation about a concept I decided to call Cloud State Monitoring. The premise was that much of cloud configuration monitoring is point-in-time evaluations, but there is additional value in monitoring the change in state of these resource configurations.

For a definition of state, I leveraged language from the State (Computer Science) entry on Wikipedia.

• A specialized definition of state is used for computer programs that operate sequentially on streams of data.
• Information about previous data received is stored and used to affect the processing of the current data.
• This is called a stateful protocol and the data carried over from the previous processing cycle is called the state.

I then proposed this for the definition of Cloud State Monitoring.

Treats cloud resource changes as a stream of data and intelligently monitors both the current data as well as changes from the previous data (state).

A few of the examples I highlighted were:

• Monitor current data for security misconfigurations
• Monitor changes in data for configuration drift

When I think about who is making changes, it is both you (as the customer)…

• Workload teams releasing software
• Platform teams enhancing automation
• Security teams updating policies

…and the cloud provider themselves.

• Adding new cloud-native service features
• Updating versions of hosted open-source software

I recorded and edited the presentation, including adding a full transcript for closed caption viewing. Check out my presentations page for full details, include the links to both the slide deck and video.