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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. ...

Geeks and sports just don’t mix. Well, thats not really true, but seems to be the stereotype that I’m accustomed to hearing. If you’re good with computers, or like science, then you probably don’t get, or don’t like sports. But here’s another crass generalization that I’ll make with absolutely no statistics to back it up: Baseball should be the sport that geeks gravitate towards. It’s a Giant Algorithm One of the knocks I hear about baseball is that the game is just too slow. It is in fact a slower paced game than basketball, hockey, soccer or really any sport that uses a game clock. But that’s what geeks should love about the game. It’s a game of anticipation for what’s going to happen next. But the list of things that will happen during any play is pretty small and they’re all based on “IF / THEN” rules just like in computer science. Let me give you an example. ...

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. ...

Amazon Web Services uses Systems Manager Documents to define actions that should be taken on your instances. This could be a wide variety of actions including updating the operating system, copying files such as logs to another destination or re-configuring your applications. These documents are written in Javascript Object Notation (JSON) and are stored within AWS for use with theother Simple Systems Manager (SSM) services such as the Automation Service or Run command. ...

Generally speaking, when you deploy infrastructure through code, or run deployment scripts you’ll need to have a certain amount of configuration data. Much of your code will have install routines but what about the configuration information that is specific to your environment? Things such as license keys, service accounts, passwords, or connection strings are commonly needed when connecting multiple services together. So how do you code that exactly? Do you pass the strings in at runtime as a parameter and then hope to remember those each time you execute code? Do you bake those strings into the code and then realize that you’ve got sensitive information stored in your deployment scripts? ...

We focus a lot of time talking about public cloud and provisioning. Infrastructure as code has changed the way in which we can deploy our workloads and how our teams are structured. We’re even allowing other teams to deploy their own workloads through our cloud management portals. But some things haven’t changed all that much. When I mention ServiceNow the first things that come to your mind are probably “Change Ticketing”, “CMDB”, or “Asset Management”. While ServiceNow certainly does all of those things, the real purpose of ServiceNow is to streamline operations. Many people who work in the enterprise probably think of ServiceNow as something that just gets in their way. No one wants to stop what they’re doing to enter a change ticket, wait for an approval or update a configuration item once deploying new servers, it’s a pain. But ServiceNow really is meant to speed up the operations process. ...

Recently, I was fortunate enough to attend Cloud Field Day 2, out in Silicon Valley. Cloud Field Day 2 brought a group of industry thought leaders together to speak with companies about their cloud products and stories. I was a little surprised to hear a reoccurring theme from some of the product vendors, which was: customers being so worried about being trapped by a public cloud vendor. Is It True? Based on my cloud consulting job, I can say that yes, many times customers are a bit worried about being locked in by a public cloud vendor. But most times this isn’t a crippling fear of being locked in, just a concern that they’d like to mitigate against if possible. But it’s like most things in the industry, you pick a valued partner and move forward with a strategy that makes sense for the business based on the information you know right now and a bet against the future. When virtualization was a new thing, I don’t recall that many conversations about making sure that both vSphere and Hyper-V were both in use in the data center so that lock-in could be prevented. We picked the partner that we saw had the most promise, capabilities, and price and built our solutions on top of those technologies. It’s still like that today, where you’ll pick a hardware vendor and attempt to prevent having multiple vendors because it increases the complexity of your services. You wouldn’t want to hire more people so that you can support two platforms, you’d want to hire the right employees to operate your corporate vision. ...