Week 9 Posting - Cloud based alarms and notifications

 In the ever-developing world of IT more companies are deciding to build out from the cloud versus going through the hassle of hosting at the office. Some of the unintended benefits of this type of planning can provide a better alert system for IT staff and small businesses owners. One super exciting feature of AWS and Azure cloud is the configuration of notifications, users can set thresholds for bandwidth or other utilization metrics to send a notification via text, email or push notification. The goal is to make the user aware of potential spikes in performance or denied request due to limitations set by the budget. These alarms can be configured to be abnormality based or fixed, in either situation the end goal is that someone or someplace will be alerted and no major changes will be made automatically. On the other end of the spectrum there are alerts that can be set to automatically scale systems as needed to provide the service even with a large influx of request, although this will cost more it is rarely a DDoS attack that will net no fruit. Once the system administrator looks at the notification there are typically two ways to increase the systems overall performance, scale up meaning more of the same system or scale out meaning more of the same systems. Depending on how the application is configured there might be a single option that works.