cloudonaut

AWS offers different types of API gateways as a managed service. This review takes a closer look at the new service API Gateway HTTP APIs announced in December 2019 and generally since available in March 2020. The cloud provider promises that HTTP APIs are faster and cheaper than it's predecessor. We will look at hard technical facts instead of flowery marketing promises.

There are countless reasons why your website is not working as your users expect. From a technical point of view, you can monitor your load balancers, your web servers, and your database. But what if that external script that you embed is breaking your site? Expired TLS certificate? Something wrong with DNS? How can you test that your website works for real users? In this episode, we introduce Clo...

Containers are a powerful tool to streamline your development and deployment process. However, a container cluster - no matter if you are using ECS (Elastic Container Service), EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service), or self-managed Kubernetes - increases complexity. You are not only managing virtual machines anymore, but you are also operating containers on top of those virtual machines. Luckily, AWS o...

The most reliable way to automate creating, updating, and deleting your cloud resources is to describe the target state of your infrastructure and use a tool to apply it to the current state of your infrastructure. AWS CloudFormation and Terraform are the most valuable tools to implement Infrastructure as Code on AWS. But what are the differences between both tools?

Using multiple AWS accounts to isolate workloads has been a best practice, not only since AWS introduced consolidated billing in 2010. AWS made a huge step by introducing AWS Organizations in 2017 and has added more and more features on top of the formerly boundary of an AWS account. In my opinion, we have passed the sweet spot between centralism and isolated accounts. The possibilities powered by...

Amazon CloudWatch improved significantly over the years. It's time to look at its monitoring capabilities again. CloudWatch is an excellent starting point to implement enhanced monitoring on AWS. In this episode, Michael demonstrates what you can do with CloudWatch metrics and alarms. Metrics provide a time-series database for telemetry (e.g., CPU utilization of an EC2 instance). Alarms watch a me...

AWS offers shiny and powerful networking services. However, you should know about the pitfalls when designing advanced networking architectures for AWS. I will share some pitfalls that came to my attention when consulting clients to get the most out of AWS. You will learn how to answer the following questions: VPC Peering or Transit Gateway NAT Gateway or Public Subnet? VPC Endpoints or NAT Gatewa...

You can run your application on virtual machines using EC2. If you prefer containers, ECS Fargate is your choice. But you can also use the latest Serverless capabilities to run your application on Lambda. But what's the best option for your project?

Do you provide services to consumer or business clients? Which channels do you provide for clients to get support, leave feedback, or let off frustration? Amazon Connect provides a contact center solution in the cloud. Your clients contact you via phone or chat. A group of agents answers their phone calls and chat conversations. The workflows are fully customizable to your specific needs. This rev...

Managing a mutable EC2 instance comes with many responsibilities. In this episode, Michael shows you how to solve everyday challenges by leveraging the latest and greatest capabilities of the AWS platform.

Are you planning to start the cloud journey for your organization soon? Learn from others to turn your initiative into a huge success. Michael and I have accompanied medium-sized businesses and enterprises in their transformation projects and would like to share our learnings with you.

re:Invent was a blast: five days packed with announcements of new services and features. We have created a top 10 list for our re:Invent recap. Here is all you need to know about re:Invent 2019.

AWS made a prominent announcement on November 6th, 2019: AWS Savings Plans. It was never easier to get a discount on compute capacity by committing to a monthly consumption and paying upfront. This blog post introduced AWS Savings Plans and compares them to other options to reduce your AWS bill as well.

Andreas is reviewing the AWS Global Accelerator. AWS introduced Global Accelerator at re:Invent in 2018. A year after that, it is about time to review the service. AWS Global Accelerator makes use of Amazon’s worldwide infrastructure and is designed to improve the performance and reliability of your applications.

We love simplicity! Our blog runs on CloudFront and S3 which is maintenance free and does handle traffic spikes easily. We use the static website generator hexo to publish our content. Lambda@Edge handles redirects and generates optimized images on the fly. Instead of Google Analytics we are using Athena and QuickSight to get statistics about our blog and posts.

Not a week goes by without a frightening announcement that an organization has leaked confidential data from Amazon S3 accidentally. Most often, the root cause of a security breach is a misconfiguration of S3 access control. Andreas presents four rules to avoid S3 data leaks to Michael in this episode.

There are many options available when you are looking for ways to implement a deployment pipeline. You might have heard about Jenkins, CircleCi, BitBucket Pipelines, GitLab Pipelines, and many others. AWS, on the other hand, offers services for CI/CD itself: CodeBuild and CodePipeline. AWS CodePipeline orchestrates deployment pipelines. Unfortunately, the learning curve is steep and the implementa...

It was never easier to scale your compute layer. EC2 Auto Scaling, Fargate, and Lambda enable horizontal scaling. But how do you scale your database? Use a NoSQL database like DynamoDB, one could say. But what if you don't want to miss all the advantages of an SQL database? You should check out Amazon Aurora Serverless, a cloud-native SQL database.

AWS Marketplace allows you to sell software to AWS customers. The customer can either run the software on its own (using AMIs and optional CloudFormation), or you can offer the software as a service (SaaS). You can also offer containers and machine learning algorithms in the AWS Marketplace. In this episode, you will learn how to sell pay per use SaaS in the AWS Marketplace. I will show you the ov...

AWS released a new feature called EC2 Instance Connect. Unfortunately, the defaults are insecure. You likely can open an SSH connection to every EC2 instance in your AWS account now.

AWS releases a new service with a lot of marketing noise. You can’t resist, you want to use that new thing now. But soon you discover that the service is missing essential features. As a result, you stumble upon a show stopper and get frustrated. Why is that? AWS ships new services with a lot of limitations and rough edges. That’s a good strategy for AWS to get early feedback. But it’s painful for...