Posts

Once a year the Discovery channel has a Shark-a-palooza around all things sharks. Silly contests like having Olympic swimmers race CGI sharks, Dirty Jobs hosts doing gross stuff with sharks, people busting shark myths… you get the picture. It’s one of my favorite weeks because you can learn stuff about cool animals and there is something to watch on TV during the summer. But this year I gave up much of my Shark Week for a good cause. The folks over at GestaltIT were having their Cloud Field Day 2 in Silicon Valley and they were gracious enough to invite me to join them as a delegate. ...

I had high expectations for the sessions being presented during Cloud Field Day 2 hosted by GestaltIT in Silicon Valley during the week of June 26th-28th. The first of the sessions presented was from a company that I hadn’t heard of before called Nirmata. I had no idea what the company did, but after the session I found out the name is an Indo-Aryan word meaning Architect or Director which makes a lot of sense considering what they do. ...

Tech Field Day will be presenting Cloud Field Day 2 on July 26th through the 28th in Silicon Valley. If you have the time, please join in on the fun and watch the live stream right here. The schedule will consist of nine great companies all explaining the ins and outs of their solutions and it’ll get real geeky. The schedule is found below and all times are Pacific US. So be sure to do the conversions. ...

Deploying security patches to servers is almost as much fun as managing backup jobs. But everyone has to do it, including companies that have moved their infrastructure to AWS. As we’ve learned with previous posts, Amazon EC2 Systems Manager allows us to use some native AWS tools for management of our EC2 instances, and patch management is no exception. EC2 Systems Manager allows you to do patch compliance where you can set a baseline and then based on a defined maintenance window a scheduled scan and deployment can be initiated on those EC2 instances. This assumes that you’ve already installed the SSM Agent and setup the basic IAM permissions for the instances to communicate with the Systems Manager service. The details can be found in the previous post. ...

In a previous post we covered the different capabilities and basic setup of EC2 Systems Manager, including the IAM roles that needed to be created and the installation of the SSM Agent. In this post we’ll focus on running some commands through the EC2 Systems Manager Console. We’ve already got an Amazon Linux instance deployed within our VPC. I’ve placed this instance in a public facing subnet and it is a member of a security group that allows HTTP traffic over port 80. ...

We love Amazon EC2 instances because of how easy they are to deploy and we have a huge catalog of templates (AMIs) to choose from which really speeds up our provisioning. But once those instances are up and running it would be really nice to have some methods of managing those instances. Luckily, Amazon has developed several capabilities to help manage Amazon EC2 instances after they’ve been deployed. These capabilities are used to execute scripts, manage patches and kick off automation routines within an EC2 instance, directly from the AWS console. ...

AWS is taking the virtualization world by storm. Workloads that used to get spun up on vSphere are now being deployed in AWS in many cases. But what if you’ve got workloads in vSphere that need to be moved? Sure, it probably makes sense to build new servers in AWS and decommission the old ones but sometimes it’s OK to lift and shift. Amazon has a service that can help with this process called the AWS Server Migration Service. ...

Blogging has been a labor of love for me for a little over five years now. I started a blog to get my own ideas written down, to document my own experiences with technology and to try to give back to an industry who had helped me improve my own skills. But blogging hasn’t been an easy thing all of the time and often comes with challenges. If you’re new to blogging and thinking about getting started, this post may help you figure out how you want to blog and if you’re an experienced blogger, I expect that you can relate to this post. ...

Amazon’s S3 is a cost effective way to store file but many organizations are used to mapping NFS shares to machines for file storage purposes. Amazon Storage Gateways are a good way to cache or store files on an NFS mount and then back them up to an S3 bucket. This post goes through the setup of an AWS Storage Gateway in an EC2 instance for caching files and storing them in an S3 bucket. This same solution (and a similar but different process) can be used to mount block devices through iSCSI or setup a Tape Gateway for backup products. ...

Preventing blueprint sprawl should be a consideration if you’re building out a new cloud through vRealize Automation. Too many blueprints and your users will be confused by the offerings and the more blueprints, the more maintenance needed to manage them. We’ve had custom methods for managing sprawl up until vRA 7.3 was released. Now we have some slick new methods right out of the box to cut down on the number of blueprints in use. These new out of the box configurations are called Component Profiles. ...