cloudonaut

Get insights into the day-to-day challenges of builders. In this issue, Monika Oblonczek from our partner tecRacer talks about how cloud migrations succeed.

I was excited when AWS announced Aurora Serverless at re:Invent 2017. Disappointment followed shortly after. Even after Aurora Serverless became a generally available service in August 2018, it was missing important features like multi-AZ deployments and read replication. Unfortunately, the innovative service never achieved a breakthrough. Therefore, I used Aurora Serverless in exceptional cases o...

Andreas invited John Culkin and Mike Zazon to talk about their latest book: the AWS Cookbook which includes 70 self-contained recipes to help you creatively solve common AWS challenges you'll encounter on your cloud journey. This show includes the following recipes: * Testing IAM Policies with the IAM Policy Simulator * Automatically Scanning Images in ECR for Security * Redacting PII from text us...

Stephen Kuenzli and I lead several cloud migration projects. In this conversation, we shared our learnings focusing on AWS security and IAM (Identity and Access Management). The result is advice and inspiration that will help you in your daily work. Our conversation is available as a video or podcast episode. In the following, you will also find a summary of our discussion.

Architecting applications on AWS is challenging. On the one hand, you need a broad understanding of AWS services. On the other hand, you have to know the details as well. In this episode, Michael outlines the mindset you need to build on AWS successfully.

Launching an EC2 instance takes minutes. Keeping your virtual machines secure and maintaining your VMs is more work. In this episode, I share seven things to do after launching a Linux, Windows, or macOS instance.

Writing CloudFormation templates from scratch is a lot of work. You will run into many issues along the way: the documentation is incomplete, magic values are required, unsupported combinations of attributes, etc. The feedback cycles are long. In the end, we have to provision real infrastructure to test the template. If you ever created an Elastisearch cluster, you feel the pain. We also observe t...

AWS allows us to run applications distributed across EC2 instances and availability zones. By adding load balancers or message queues to the architecture, we can achieve fault tolerance or high availability. But how can we test that our system can survive faults in reality? Assuming an application has five consumers and seven downstream dependencies. What happens if one of them fails? Are all time...

We coached developers building their first Serverless applications for a large company recently and want to share our learnings and observations with you.

I completed my first AWS certification in 2014: AWS Solutions Architect Associate. During the following years, I accomplished all five associate and professional certificates. However, Michael and I decided not to renew our AWS certifications about a year ago. In the following, I will share five good reasons not to get AWS certified!

Elastic Block Storage (EBS) provides solid state drives (SSD) and hard disk drives (HDD) for EC2 instances. The virtual machine accesses the persistent storage via the network. In December 2020, AWS announced another volume type called General Purpose SSD (gp3). So now there are three volume types based on SSDs. In this episode, Andreas compares gp2, gp3, and io2 volumes and guides how to choose t...

Werner Vogels's keynote was a blast and definitely the highlight of re:Invent 2020. Michael and I are going through the announced features and services. As usual, we also take a look at the technical details.

Are you following the Infrastructure as Code approach using CloudFormation? If so, I bet you encountered a situation where CloudFormation misses support for a service's latest features. I run into those issues weekly! So what can we do about it?

Andreas Wittig and Michael Wittig from cloudonaut are discussing Andy Jassy's keynote from re:Invent 2020. The focus is on the newly announced services and features: ECS Anywhere, EBS volumes (gp3), Aurora Serverless v3, Lambda Container Support, and many more.

The Elastic Container Service (ECS) is Amazon's container orchestration service. Besides that there is Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) the managed Kubernetes offering by AWS. Both container clusters support EC2 and Fargate as the underlying compute engine.

AWS offers five different types of API Gateways. Which option fits your needs?

Michael shares his learnings about IPv6 on AWS. Enabling IPv6 is highly recommended for public endpoints like CloudFront and ALB. On top of that, Michael explains how to enable IPv6 for your VPCs.

In this episode, Michael unboxes Amazon Timestream for us. A recently launched time-series database. Andreas asks questions like: What is Amazon Timestream? How does it work? What are typical use cases? And Michael tells us why his first job was all about time-series data.

Are you using a container registry already? Andreas Wittig and Michael Hausenblas discuss different scenarios and options. The episode focuses on ECR including recent announcements and upcoming features. On top of that, the episode includes a comparison of different container registry options: Amazon ECR, Docker Hub, and GitHub Container Registry.

Have you ever looked at an IAM policy and wondered: Is it really necessary to grant access to this specific action? Or do you need to know which API calls a legacy or 3rd party application is actually sending to come up with a secure IAM policy? CloudTrail can help here, but there is something better: Record API calls with the AWS SDKs and CLI (including the stuff that is not visible in CloudTrail...

It seems to me like everyone is talking about service meshes these days - definetly a hot topic in the world of containers and microservices. A service mesh promises reducing latency, increasing observability, and simplifying security within microservice architectures. AWS announced a preview for App Mesh in November 2018 and the general availability in March 2019. Therefore, it is about time to t...

I was recently invited to a CloudFormation workshop with a group of early CloudFormation users. I soon realized that the group had a good understanding of the basics, so I started to introduce more advanced features. Today, I would like to share with you six CloudFormation features that have inspired the workshop participants most.

Choosing storage service is critical when designing a cloud architecture. Read on to learn about the characteristics, limitations, typical use cases, and a decision tree for the following options to store data on AWS: Instance Store, EBS, EFS, FSx, and S3.

In this episode, Michael invited a guest: [Philipp Garbe](https://twitter.com/pgarbe). Philipp is an AWS Container Hero, Working in the Cloud, and we hope you enjoy his Bavarian accent as much as the knowledge he shares with us.

In this episode, Michael compares the available messaging options on AWS. The goal of messaging is to decouple the producers of messages from consumers. The messaging pattern allows us to process the messages asynchronously. This has several advantages. You can roll out a new version of consumers of messages while the producers can continue to send new messages at full speed. You can also scale th...