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I’m a big advocate for building your cloud apps to take advantage of cloud features. This usually means re-architecting them so that things like AWS Availability Zones can be used seemlessly. But I also know that to get benefits of the cloud quickly, this can’t always happen. If you’re trying to reduce your data center footprint rapidly due to a building lease or hardware refresh cycle quickly approaching, then you probably need a migration tool to accomplish this task. ...

Reserved Instances are often used to reduce the price of Amazon EC2 instance on-demand pricing. If you’re not familiar with Reserved Instances, then you’re missing out. Reserved Instances, or RIs, are a billing construct used in conjunction with Amazon EC2 instances (virtual machines). The default usage on the AWS platform is the on-demand pricing in which you get billed by the hour or second with no commitments. Basically, when you decide to terminate an instance you stop paying for it. ...

Multi-Factor Authentication or MFA, is a common security precaution used to prevent someone from gaining access to an account even if an attacker has your username and password. With MFA you must also have a device that generates a time based one time password (TOTP) in addition to the standard username/password combination. The extra time it might take to login is well worth the advantages that MFA provides. Having your AWS account hijacked could be a real headache. ...

There is news in the backup world today. Rubrik has acquired startup company Datos IO. Who is Datos IO? Datos IO was founded in 2014 and focuses on copy data management of distributed scale out databases purpose built for the cloud. The reason Datos IO is different from the common backup solutions we’re accustomed to seeing (Commvault, DataDomain, etc) is that they are building a solution from the ground up that tackles the problems of geo-dispersed scale out database which are becoming commonplace in the cloud world. Think about databases that scale multiple continents, and multiple clouds even. ...

AWS Organizations is a way for you to organize your accounts and have a hierarchy not only for bills to roll up to a single paying account, but also to setup a way to add new accounts programatically. For the purposes of this discussion, take a look at my AWS lab account structure. From the AWS Organizations Console we can see the account structure as well. I need to create a new account in a new OU under my master billing account. This can be accomplished through the console, but it can also be done through the AWS CLI, which is what I’ll do here. NOTE: This can be done through the API as well which can be really useful for automating the building of new accounts. ...

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? ...