Amazon Web Services (AWS)

A quick summary of what happened in the AWS universe last week. /images/2016/06/weekly.jpg Monday, July 25 Service expansion: API Gateway & AWS Lambda is now available in Asia Pacific (Singapore) Snowball is now available in EU (Frankfurt) region. Start and stop EC2 Instances based on tags: Creating an Enterprise Scheduler Using AWS Lambda and Tagging Tuesday, July 26 Developer Support plan price cut: Now starting at Math.max($29, 3% of monthly AWS spend) / month Wednesday, July 27 Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports Elasticsearch 2.3 Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports SQL Server Native Backup/Restore with S3 Thursday, July 28 Your AWS Account…

A quick summary of what happened in the AWS universe last week. /images/2016/06/weekly.jpg Monday, July 18 Going Serverless: CloudSploit shared their migration story New course from AWS Community Hero ‪Lynn Langit: Amazon Web Services for Data Science Tuesday, July 19 Microservice Software Architecture: Airtime engineering team shares their architecture Wednesday, July 20 Four New AWS Training Bootcamps: Build your Technical Skills! We can deliver those trainings in cooperation with tecRacer, a AWS Premier Consulting Partner! AWS CloudFormation Updates: Support for AWS IoT, custom names for IAM resources, better support for API Gateway Thursday, July 21 …

A quick summary of what happened in the AWS universe last week. /images/2016/06/weekly.jpg Monday, July 11 Allocating costs: AWS Directory Service supporting tags. Developing serverless applications with Python: AWS has released a developer preview of chalice, the Python Serverless Microframework. Getting started with Docker on AWS: Arun Gupta explains how to get started with Docker for AWS. Restricting access to S3 bucket: AWS Security Blog about restricting S3 access to a specific IAM role. Tuesday, July 12 Automating AWS WAF configuration: AWS Security Blog explains how to use CloudFormation to deploy WAF configuration. Querying AWS resources: Binh Le published …

A quick summary of what happened in the AWS universe last week. /images/2016/06/weekly.jpg Monday, June 20 AWS announced EC2 is now supporting SQL Server 2016. AWS Blog published a guest post: Zynga Gets in the Game with Amazon Aurora. Software Engineering Daily is discussing Serverless Code. Tuesday, June 21 AWS Blog announced EBS is supporting cross-account copying of encrypted snapshots now. AWS Security announced their new Twitter handle @AWSSecurityInfo. APN Blog presented the quick start for Docker Datacenter (DDC). Wednesday, June 22 AWS announced OpsWorks supports CentOS 7. AWS is offering self-service for Direct Connect LOAs. AWS added failed action ret…

Quick summary of what happened in the AWS universe last week. /images/2016/06/weekly.jpg Monday, June 13 Cloud Academy explained Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Amazon Kinesis Firehose Tuesday, June 14 AWS SES Blog announced Amazon SES Now Supports Email Headers in Notifications AWS announced More Details from Service Last Accessed Data AWS announced AWS Config offers a new rule for assessing license compliance AWS announced New Edge Location in New Delhi, India for Amazon CloudFront and Amazon Route 53 Server Density Blog wrote about How Spotify and GOV.UK handle on call, and more Wednesday, June 15 AWS announced Standardized Architecture for NIS…

The AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) allows you to manage AWS services. Using the CLI from your terminal interactively allows you to half-automate tasks and frees you from logging into the AWS Management Console. In addition integrating the CLI into shell scripts allows you to automate your infrastructure and the configuration of EC2 instances during the boot process. This article covers typical hurdles when using the AWS CLI. Command Completion When using the CLI interactively within your terminal command completion is a killer feature you should not miss. When enabled Command Completion allows you to use the TAB key to complete commands. This will speed up your CLI u…

AWS is innovating fast. This is a summary of what happened during past month. Announcements and News AWS Certificate Manager allows to generate SSL/TLS certificates in the following regions: US East (N.Virginia), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and South America (Sao Paulo). (Official Announcement) Important announcement for Elastic Container Service (ECS): you are now able to scale the number of tasks of a service automatically. (Official Announcement) Kinesis Firehose added configurable retry duration of up to 7200 seconds for ingestin…

The Gold Standard for modern cloud-native applications is a serverless architecture. AWS Lambda allows you to implement scalable and fault tolerant applications without the need of a single virtual machine. A serverless infrastructure based on AWS Lambda has two key benefits: You don’t need to manage a fleet of virtual machines anymore. Deploying new versions of your code can be entirely controlled by API calls. /images/2016/05/cloudcraft---SQS-Lambda-1.png This article shows you how to process asynchronous tasks serverless. Possible use cases are: sending out massive amounts of emails, transcoding video files after upload, or analyzing user behavior. An SQS queue wi…

AWS is innovating fast. This is a summary of what happened during past month. Announcements and News CloudFormation adds support for EC2 Dedicated Hosts, improves handling of ECS and allows you to specify a name for a Lambda function. (Official Announcement) Define CloudWatch event rules with CloudFormation. (Official Announcement) Kinesis Firehose adds Elasticsearch as additional target for your streaming data. Other supported targets are S3 and Redshift. (Official Announcement) Two important feature announcements regarding Kinesis Streams: time-based shard iterators and shard-level metrics. (Official Announcement) Device Farm adds possibility to access iOS testing d…

We released four new CloudFormation templates. Using our Infrastructure as Code templates will help you to bootstrap common setups on Amazon Web Services (AWS) within minutes. Our templates are exclusively designed for AWS CloudFormation, the Infrastructure as Code services on AWS. Learn more about our Templates for AWS CloudFormation on GitHub. Static website This template describes the infrastructure for hosting a static website behind a CDN. /images/2016/02/static-website.png Install free template NAT Gateway This template creates a NAT Gateway that forwards HTTP, HTTPS and NTP traffic from private subnets to the Internet. /images/2016/03/vpc-nat-gateway.png In…

AWS is innovating fast. This is a summary of what happened during past month. Announcements and News Happy Birthday AWS, 10 years of Cloud Computing. (AWS Blog Post) Referencing Security Groups in peered VPCs is possible even if the VPCs belong to different accounts. (Official Announcement) Long EC2 instance and reservation IDs are default for new accounts in US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), US West (Northern California), EU (Ireland), and EU (Frankfurt). (Official Announcement) t2.nano available in all public regions. (Official Announcement) API Gateway and Lambda available in EU (Frankfurt). (Official Announcement) EC2 Container Registry Available in US…

The official AWS Week in Review gets longer and longer. This is a shortened version containing the most important news. Reference Security Groups in a peered VPC CloudWatch Events are Now Available in the eu-central-1 AWS CLI, AWS SDKs (JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Java) updated View the full article

Since this year I’m working as an AWS Cloud Consultant where I see a lot of small to medium sized AWS deployments. Most of them are typical web applications. I want to share with you the 5 most common mistakes that you better avoid: managing infrastructure manually not using Auto Scaling Groups not analyzing metrics in CloudWatch ignoring Trusted Advisor underutilizing virtual machines If you are interested in how to avoid the mistakes in a typical web application read on. This post received over 500 points and over 250 comments on Hacker News. Typical web application A typical web application consists of at least: load balancer scalable web backend database an…

Scaling a traditional, relational database is very hard because transactional guarantees (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability also known as ACID) require communication between all nodes of the database. The more nodes you add, the slower your database gets, because more and more nodes must coordinate transactions between each other. The way to tackle this has been to use databases which don’t adhere to these guarantees. We call them NoSQL databases. Amazon provides a NoSQL database service called DynamoDB. Unlike Relational Database Service (RDS) which is effectively providing several common RDBMS engines like MySQL, Oracle Database, Microsoft SQL Server and Po…

Werner Vogels (CTO of AWS) is quoted with “Everything fails all the time.”. This does not mean AWS is an unreliable cloud provider. Quite the contrary: AWS plans for failure. All services are highly available or fault tolerant. Some of them by default, some of them offer tools to achieve this goal. Problem An EC2 instance (virtual machine) is not highly available by default. The underlying virtualization layer, the operating system of the host system or the hardware of the host system are possible points of failure. If one of these parts break, the EC2 instance will become unavailable. Solution AWS offers tools to handle the failure of an EC2 instance. The following f…

This article teaches you how to create a serverless RESTful API on AWS. You will use OpenAPI Specification formerly known as Swagger Specification to define the API and API Gateway in combination with Lambda to implement the API. DynamoDB is used to store the data. The example’s source code is available on GitHub and can be used to speed up your own project. If you are interested in describing the API in CloudFormation read Create a serverless RESTful API with API Gateway, CloudFormation, Lambda, and DynamoDB instead! If you are interested in deploying the API with the Serverless Framework read Create a serverless RESTful API with the Serverless Framework powered by API…

This page has moved to GitHub: https://github.com/widdix/aws-cf-templates/tree/master/ec2 View the full article

WordPress is a very popular blogging software. You can run the PHP application together with a MySQL database on an EC2 instance (virtual machine) easily. But if you are following the official tutorial to setup your blogging environment on AWS you are missing two important advantages: High Availability: a single EC2 instance is not highly available. A failing host system or datacenter will cause an outage of your virtual machine and therefore of your WordPress blog. Scalability: a single EC2 instance is not scalable. If one of your blog posts gets attention from Hacker News or another social media source, you are not able to serve all the incoming requests properly. …

Every year AWS runs a big conference with 19,000 attendees in Las Vegas to announce new services and to educate people in more than 270 sessions about how to use AWS. As usual there was a keynote on Wednesday focusing on enterprise topics and a second keynote on Thursday focusing on the more innovative services. JavaScript is disabled. Please visit YouTube.com to watch the video. Virtual computing: EC2 During the keynote Werner Vogels announced new instance types. So far a t2.micro instance with 1 GiB memory and 1 virtual CPU was the smallest and cheapest EC2 instance type available. The new t2.nano instance type is even smaller providing 512 MB memory and 1 virtual C…

Every year AWS runs a big conference with 19,000 attendees in Las Vegas to announce new services and to educate people in more than 270 sessions about how to use AWS. Although the conference started on Monday, the first Keynote was on Wednesday. And as usual the focus was enterprise customers. I want to highlight the most interesting three service announcements that could have a big impact on enterprise IT. JavaScript is disabled. Please visit YouTube.com to watch the video. AWS Import/Export Snowball Getting data into the cloud is a challenge. If you ever tried to upload terabytes of data you know that. If you don’t have a big connection to the Internet you can send …

You can track every change made to your AWS account with CloudTrail. Did you know that you can also monitor your AWS account in near real time with custom rules specific to your use case? By combining CloudTrail, S3, SNS, and Lambda, you can run a piece of code to check the API activity in your account. Because of the reporting frequency of CloudTrail, this will happen approximately every 5 minutes. This post explains how to deploy a solution to monitor your EC2 instance tags for suspicious behavior. The following figure shows how this works on a high level. /images/2015/08/AWS-tag-watch-2.png Let’s look at a concrete example. What is suspicious behavior? CloudTrail…

This blog post was written in July 2015 and is partly outdated. Amazon released [VPC endpoint for S3](http://aws.amazon.com/de/about-aws/whats-new/2015/05/introducing-amazon-vpc-endpoints-for-amazon-s3) and [Amazon VPC NAT Gateway](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2015/12/introducing-amazon-vpc-nat-gateway-a-managed-nat-service/) in the meantime. tl;dr Think twice if you’re planning to use a VPC architecture containing a private subnet that includes EC2 instances that need to connect to the public Internet, especially if you have to do many requests or transfer a lot of data. Being able to build a private network in the cloud with Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) i…

Generally speaking, you can host any application on AWS. If you interact with AWS, you will always make calls to the API. The API is the interface between you and AWS as figure 1 demonstrates. /images/2015/05/fig1-1.png Figure 1 Tools to interact with the AWS API You will now get an overview of tools that are available to make calls to the AWS API. Please compare the following tools in their ability to automate your daily tasks. Web Management Console You can interact with AWS by using the web-based Management Console. You can manually control AWS with this convenient GUI that runs in every modern web browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari >= 5, IE >= 9). Figure 2 is …

Newer edition available! Amazon Web Services in Action, Second Edition is now available. Andreas and I, have written a book about Amazon Web Services (AWS) called Amazon Web Services in Action. Our book focuses on essential AWS services including virtual servers (EC2), networking (VPC), SQL databases (RDS), NoSQL databases (DynamoDB), object storage (S3), block storage (EBS) and much more. The discussion of best practices regarding security, high availability and scalability are part of our book as well. /images/2015/10/AWSinAction_Cover_Large.png Amazon Web Services in Action focuses on Infrastructure as Code with the help of an AWS service called AWS CloudFormatio…

This article excerpted from Amazon Web Services in Action, shows that you can run any application on AWS by using one or a combination of different services. The four examples we present in this article will give you an idea of what you can do with AWS. Hosting a web shop When you are hosting a web shop on-premise, you would typically rent a server in a data center. On this server you run a web server, handling the requests from your users and a database storing your products and orders. You can run this same setup in AWS as figure 1 shows. /images/2015/05/fig1.png Figure 1: Comparison of how to run a web shop on-premise and on AWS You might ask yourself: Why should I…