Posts

In a previous post, we looked at how to use change sets with CloudFormation. This post covers how to use change sets with a nested CloudFormation Stack. If you’re not familiar with nested CloudFormation stacks, it is just what it sounds like. A root stack or top level stack will call subordinate or child stacks as part of the deployment. These nested stacks could be deployed as a standalone stack or they can be tied together by using the AWS::CloudFormation::Stack resource type. Nested stacks can be used to deploy entire environments from the individual stacks below it. In fact a root stack may not deploy any resources at all other than what comes from the nested stacks. An example of a commons stacking method might be to have a top level stack that deploys a VPC, while a nested stack is responsible for deploying subnets within that stack. You could keep chaining this together to deploy EC2 instances, S3 buckets or whatever you’d like. ...

If you’ve done any work in Amazon Web Services you probably know the importance of CloudFormation (CFn) as part of your Infrastructure as Code (IaC) strategy. CloudFormation provides a JSON or YAML formatted document which describes the AWS infrastructure that you want to deploy. If you need to re-deploy the same infrastructure across production and development environments, this is pretty easy since the configuration is in a template stored in your source control. ...

If you’ve been in technology for a while, you’ve probably had to go through a hardware refresh cycle at some point. These cycles usually meant taking existing hardware, doing some capacity planning exercises and setting out to buy new hardware that is supported by the vendors. This process was usually lengthy and made CIOs break into a cold sweat just thinking about paying for more hardware, that’s probably just meant to keep the lights on. Whenever I first learned of a hardware refresh cycle, my first thoughts were “Boy, this sounds expensive!” ...

Over recent years, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has become sort of a utopian goal of many organizations looking to modernize their infrastructure. The benefits to IaC have been covered many times so I won’t go into too much detail, but the highlights include: Reproducibility of an environment Reduction in deployment time Linking infrastructure deployments with application deployments Source control for infrastructure items Reduction of misconfiguration The reasoning behind storing all of your infrastructure as code is valid and a worthy goal. The agility, stability, and deployment speeds achieved through IaC can prove to have substantial benefits to the business as a whole. ...

It’s the beginning of a whole new year. Hopefully you’ve gotten some time off recently to recharge your batteries a bit, before heading back to the grind. While you’re getting back into the ol’ routine, maybe this is a good time to consider whether or not that routine is still worthwhile? Are you Happy With Your Job? I t’s easy to get into a funk where you roll out of bed each day to do the same task or face the same challenges over and over again. Maybe there are things in your day to day grind that you hate, but do them anyway, because it’s part of your job. No big deal, everyone has these sorts of chores. I’m sure that nobody loves every single part of their job. But if you’ve gotten a break from work and you can’t bear to think about going back to that routine, maybe that should tell you something about your job. Are you really happy doing what you’re doing, or are you doing it because it’s a steady paycheck? Are you doing it because it’s what you know, and change is hard? Are you doing it because you feel like you have no other choice? ...

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. ...