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. ...
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? ...