With Midnight Madness, AWS kicked off the official re:Invent announcements. For some reason, I didn’t go to Midnight Madness, but jet lag woke me up early enough that I can at least write about some of the announcements before I’m immersed in re:Invent activities.

With re:Invent less than a week out, I figured it was a good time to see how last year's re:Invent held up. After all, every year we get wowed with all the new services and features that are announced, but how long does it take until we can use those? In fact, it's a year later now, but can we actually use everything that was promised?

As I don’t believe I can replicate the back and forth that (hopefully) made the talk itself entertaining, the structure of this writeup will be slightly different than the talk. If you are interested in the slide deck however, you can find that below, and once the video recording goes up, I will add that as well.

Back in July I, together with my friend Prateek, presented at Container Camp in Sydney. It’s taken me a while, but I finally got around to doing a writeup of the contents.

This is the third post in a series about connecting to your EC2 instances. In the first post I talked about EC2 Instance Connect and the second one was all about Systems Manager Session Manager. In this third post, I’ll have a brief comparison between the two, before looking at some ways to minimise needing this access.

This post finishes the small series of posts on the CMD blog. It’s been fun to write and it made me look deeper into some possibilities for connecting to your instances. My preference there remains the same however, and that’s what is highlighted in this post. Avoid needing to connect in the first place.

Instead of a normal weekly note, I decided to take a close look at the good and bad of the new device based MFA support in AWS SSO.

This is the second entry in a series of three posts about accessing your EC2 instances. The first entry concerned EC2 Instance Connect, and in this post I’ll discuss the awkwardly named AWS Systems Manager Session Manager.

As promised previously, this is the continuation of my series of posts about connecting to your EC2 instances on the CMD Solutions blog. You can read the first one here.

AWS introduced CloudWatch Anomaly Detection as a way to get smarter alarms for your metrics. There were also a couple of smaller updates to the AWS container services.

Two weeks ago was Cloudflare's birthday week, during which they tend to release new features. This year was no exception, and I'm taking a look at their new Workers Sites. In addition, AWS launches IQ, which is basically experts as a service.

Many of us have probably built tools that allow someone to use their own SSH key to access a server; I know I have. Instance Connect is the AWS solution for this. It lets you upload a temporary key to an instance and then immediately connect to it. And for two of the options, you don’t even need to use your own key.

This is my first post on the CMD blog and is the first in a series of three concerned with connecting safely to an EC2 instance. In this first post I dive into the new-ish EC2 Instance Connect.

CMD Solutions is the AWS focused brand within Mantel Group, which DigIO (my employer) is also a part of. Because of my status as AWS APN Ambassador, I represent CMD as well. Which also means that for some of my blogposts¹, those focused on some small part of AWS for example, CMD is the better outlet. This is a good example of that.

Working closely with our clients, we occasionally have the opportunity to do something a little bit outside of the norm. In this post, we (Declan and Arjen) were lucky enough to help out Belong with a fun learning event.

Last month my colleague and I got to run a DeepRacer event at the client we’re working at. This post shows what that was like, how we did it, and what lessons we learned.

This week AWS released several useful features for existing services. Step Functions now support Dynamic Parallelism, and you can now replicate your S3 buckets within the same region.

Amazon Quantum Ledger Database was released, and Flow Logs allow the addition of meta-data.

Today is focused once again on a couple of very welcome improvements. This time that concerns Lambda's shared ENIs and IAM Roles for EKS services.

Amazon Forecast is released, and a couple of new features show how Session Manager works and suddenly make it look like a completely different service.

Both App Mesh and Step Functions gained some long-awaited functionalities, and I take a brief look at some improvements to the out of the box runtimes for CodeBuild.