Archive | Posts

Fixing AWS SSO's CloudFormation

A couple of weeks ago, the AWS SSO team finally released functionality I've been anxiously waiting for: a (limited) API and CloudFormation support! So now it's time to break that down and complain about the CloudFormation implementation.

The New and Improved AWS CLI v2

The AWS CLI is one of the major ways of interacting with AWS, so in that regard the release of version 2.0 last week is a major milestone. Therefore, I want to take a look at what it is, how it's different, and what's good not so good about it.

AWS Inside the Region

During Andy Jassy's keynote at re:Invent he spent an entire section talking about several new products that would extend AWS 'Beyond the Region'. While this will no doubt give some more options, the main way we'll all be running our AWS services is still going to be within a Region. So let's have a look at how these evolved over time.

Midnight Madness Jet lag

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.

re:Invent 2018 - One Year Later

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?

Letting Go Of Your Instances

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.

Managing Your Instance Sessions

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.

Connecting with EC2 Instance Connect

This is the first entry in a series of three posts about accessing your EC2 instances. EC2 Instance Connect, which I’ll call Instance Connect from here, allows you to connect to an instance that doesn’t have a key installed.

GitHub Actions - Awesome Automation

In October, GitHub announced GitHub Actions, their upcoming integrated solution for running automation triggered by things you do on GitHub. I would call it CI/CD, but that's only part of what it can do. I've had beta access for about 2 months now, but didn't really play around with it until around the Christmas period.

DeepRacer

In lieu of a single weekly note, I will be writing several articles to catch up with some of the events from re:Invent. Chris helped out last week with his post about the DynamoDB changes, and today I will start my write-ups with the coolest new toy: DeepRacer.

Serverless Databases after re:Invent

That’s a wrap for re:Invent 2018! Whilst Arjen will no doubt be providing us with the low down on all things containers in due course, I’ve hijacked his excellent blog to bring you a short guest post on serverless database news.

Serverless Bastions on Demand

Fargate bastions allow you to spin up a bastion host only when you need it and tear it down afterwards. All using AWS serverless technologies, which means that you don't pay anything for them unless you actively use it.

Bulletproof at Container Camp 2018

On May 23, the second iteration in Australia of the Container Camp conference started and this year Bulletproof was a sponsor. Conferences like this always give a good indication of where the market is, and especially to see where it’s going.