Google AppSheet

 

AppSheet is a powerful business productivity solution that lets you build powerful mobile apps with your spreadsheet data.  Tech theme is "Data to Device"

Customers will be able to develop richer applications at scale that leverage Google technologies including Google Sheets, Google Forms, Android, Maps and Google Analytics and that integrate with cloud-hosted data sources including Salesforce, Dropbox, AWS DynamoDB and MySQL

It is absolutely zero coding with the below nine steps process:

1. Prepare your data.
2. Connect your data to AppSheet to create an app.
3. Refine how your app uses your data.
4. Refine how your app presents your data.
5. Add actions, workflows, and reports to your app.
6. Define your app's security settings.
7. Test your app with real users.
8. Deploy and share your app.
9. Improve your app and get feedback.

Ref: https://solutions.appsheet.com/how-to-create-an-app

Early 2020, Google acquired AppSheet, an eight-year-old no-code mobile-application-building platform.  With AppSheet,  Google  gets a simple way for companies to build mobile apps without having to write a line of code. It works by pulling data from a spreadsheet, database or form, and using the field or column names as the basis for building an app.

In an essence, AppSheet will be a game changing business model for anyone (including young student) to be a seamless entrepreneur with zero capital investment and rapid time to market.  R u ready!

Right Sizing Instances

Rightsizing starts with monitoring and analyzing your current services being used. In fact, Rightsizing tops the list of cost optimization four pillars

An observation period of at least two weeks or maybe even a month will give you sufficient information on the instance performance and usage patterns while also showing you the peak of your workload.

The metrics that define instance performance include:

1. vCPU utilization
2. Memory utilization
3. Network utilization
4. Disk usage

Right-sizing functionality is available as a native feature of AWS Compute Optimizer. Details here: https://aws.amazon.com/compute-optimizer/

Convertible Reserved Instance

 

Let’s say you’ve already purchased a Convertible RI and have since rightsized your instances. You can’t technically downsize a Convertible RI — the instance type that you convert to has to be of equal or greater value.

Trick is depicted in the given diagram.

First, convert your Convertible RI to t2.nano Linux RIs, which is the smallest and cheapest type of RI. It may mean that you’re converting your RI into dozens or even hundreds of t2.nano RIs.

Then from there, you can convert the t2.nano RIs to whatever RI type you wish.

Essentially, converting your larger RI to lots of small RIs is like converting a $100 bill into $1 bills, giving you the flexibility to trade up to a $10 bill, two $20 bills, and a $50 bill. You’re still spending the same amount (which gets around the Convertible RI limit). But you get to trade down to a smaller instance type and have leftover “change” to apply to another instance. 

 

SQS & CloudWatch

Amazon SQS (Simple Queue Service) is a managed queue component from AWS cloud service.  Amazon CloudWatch enables you to collect, access, and correlate this data on a single platform from across all your AWS resources, applications, and services.  User can view and analyze your queues' metrics from the Amazon SQS console, the CloudWatch console, using the AWS CLI, or using the CloudWatch API.

The combination of SQS and CloudWatch is powerful in terms of stability, scalability, resilency, performance, etc.  It is achievable by setting CloudWatch alarms for Amazon SQS metrics.

CloudWatch metrics for your Amazon SQS queues are automatically collected and pushed to CloudWatch at one-minute intervals. These metrics are gathered on all queues that meet the CloudWatch guidelines for being active. CloudWatch considers a queue to be active for up to six hours if it contains any messages or if any action accesses it.