Technology

With all of the services that Amazon has to offer, it can sometimes be difficult to manage your cloud environment. Face it, you need to manage multiple regions, users, storage buckets, accounts, instances and the list just keeps going on. Well the fact that the environment can be so vast might make it difficult to notice if something nefarious is going on in your cloud. Think of it this way, if a new EC2 instance was deployed in one of your most used regions, you might see it and wonder what it was, but if that instance (or 50 instances) was deployed in a region that you never login to, would you notice that? ...

Today at AWS re:INVENT, Amazon had several new product announcements which is not uncommon for the company but one in-particular raised several eyebrows. Amazon has been working very hard to make machine learning much easier for people to use. Typically, understanding machine learning has taken great expertise and a relatively small number of people even attempted to learn these concepts just because of the complexity. That is all changing thanks to some of Amazon’s more recently announced services such as Amazon Sage Maker. ...

If you’re an Amazon Web Services customer and you’re not using the built in AWS config rules, you should be. AWS Config is a service that shows you the configuration changes that have happened on your AWS accounts. Whether that’s changes to your user accounts, changes to networks, modifications to S3 buckets or plenty of other configurations. AWS Config will keep this audit log of your changes in a specified S3 bucket which could be used for all sorts of other solutions such as updating your ServiceNow configuration management database. See this post from ServiceNow on some details of the solution. ...

Sometimes it’s just not desirable to have your Amazon EC2 instances deployed all willy-nilly across the AWS infrastructure. Sure it’s nice not having to manage the underlying infrastructure but in some cases you actually need to be able to manage the hosts themselves. One example is when you have licensing that is “old-fashioned” and uses physical core counts. With the default tenancy model, host core counts just don’t make sense, so what can we do? ...

Amazon Web Services has some great tools to help you operate your EC2 instances with their Simple Systems Manager services. These services include ensuring patches are deployed within maintenance windows specified by you, automation routines that are used to ensure state and run commands on a fleet of servers through the AWS console. These tools are great but wouldn’t be be even better if I could use these tools to manage my VMware virtual machines too? Well, you’re in luck, because EC2 SSM can do just that and better yet, the service itself is free! Now, if you’ve followed along with the " AWS EC2 Simple Systems Manager Reference" guide you’ve probably already seen the goodies that we’ve got available, so this post is used to show you how you can use these same tools on your vSphere, Hyper-V or other on-premises platforms. ...

VMware has been busy over the last year trying to re-invent themselves with more focus on cloud. With that they’ve added some new SaaS products that can be used to help manage your cloud environments and provide some additional governance IT departments. Cloud makes things very simple to deploy and often eliminates the resource request phases that usually slow down provisioning. But once you start using the cloud, you can pretty quickly lose track of the resources that you’ve deployed, and now are paying for on a monthly basis, so it’s important to have good visibility and management of those resources. ...

Sometimes, you just need to change the data center where you’re running your virtual machines. You could be doing this for disaster recovery reasons, network latency reasons, or just because you’re shutting down a region. In an on-prem environment, you might move workloads to a different data center by vMotion, VMware Site Recovery Manager, Zerto, Recoverpoint for VMs, Veeam, or one of the other great tools for a virtualized environment. But how about if that VM is running in an AWS region and you want to move it to another region? ...

When it comes to deploying EC2 instances within Amazon Web Services VPCs, you may find yourself confused when presented with those tenancy options. This post aims to describe the different options that you have with AWS tenancy and how they might be used. First and foremost, what do we mean by tenancy? Well, tenancy determines who is the owner of a resource. It might be easiest to think of tenancy in terms of housing. For instance if you have a house then you could consider it a dedicated tenant since only one family presumably lives there. However, if you have an apartment building, there is a good chance that several families have rooms in a single building which would be more like a shared tenancy model. ...

Please use this post as a landing page to get you started with using the EC2 Simple Systems Manager services from Amazon Web Services. Simple Systems Manager or (SSM) is a set of services used to manage EC2 instances as well as on-premises machines (known as managed instances) with the SSM agent installed on them. You can use these services to maintain state, run ad-hoc commands, and configure patch compliance among other things. ...

Sometimes you need to ensure that things are always a certain way when you deploy AWS EC2 instances. This could be things like making sure your servers are always joined to a domain when being deployed, or making sure you run an Ansible playbook every hour. The point of the AWS EC2 SSM State Manager service is to define a consistent state for your EC2 instances. This post will use a fictional use case where I have a an EC2 instance or instances that are checking every thirty minutes to see if they should use a new image for their Apache website. The instance will check against the EC2 Simple Systems Manager Parameter Store, which we’ve discussed in a previous post, and will download the image from the S3 location retrieved from that parameter. ...