AWS released an update to ECS auto scaling, Google Cloud Platform wrote an interesting article about user accounts, and I became a Cloud Warrior.

ECS Target Tracking

About a day before I posted my article about autoscaling ECS, AWS released something new for this. Which I didn’t realise until I went to put in all the links as most of the article had been written already. This new feature is called Target Tracking, and it allows you to basically define a target that your ECS containers will attempt to follow.

What this means is that the autoscaling can be a lot smarter. Where previously you might have used CPU alarms to automatically scale the number of containers up or down based, you can now tell ECS to automatically adjust the number of containers to ensure that a pre-defined average CPU usage is maintained. Basically, if you set your desired CPU to 60% it will automatically add or remove containers to ensure it stays there.

User Account Best Practices

On the Google Cloud Platform Blog an interesting article was posted concerning best practices for user accounts and authorisation. While in a way there isn’t anything ground breaking in there, it is good to have it all in a clear overview and can be a good starting point for when you next need to consider your user management. Considering the number of places where you still can’t even use a long generated password¹, I believe these kinds of articles should just be highlighted once in a while.

APN Cloud Warrior

Last week I became an AWS Partner Network (APN) Cloud Warrior² for my company Bulletproof. This program is basically a group of people who are handpicked by AWS for their contributions to the wider community and within their company. As a premier partner, we already had a Cloud Warrior but he decided to step down which opened the door for me to become one³.

The program is interesting in that it allows me to meet with people in similar roles around Australia and New Zealand during special meetups/events. This will give me a chance to learn from them and improve myself even more, as well as see what’s coming down the track from AWS. Which for obvious reasons I won’t be able to write about until it’s publicly available or announced. But as evangelising the platform is basically part of the role description⁴ I’ll be writing about AWS regularly. Not that you’ll likely notice much of a difference there.