Welcome to cloudonaut

Your launchpad for Amazon Web Services

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Welcome to cloudonaut

Your launchpad for Amazon Web Services

How to Become an AWS Certified Solutions Architect

In 2012, I created my first AWS account. Back then, I worked as a software engineer and was looking for a way to deploy an online trading platform. Two years later, I attended re:Invent — the yearly conference organized by AWS — in Las Vegas for the fir...

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Recent videos

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#014 Unboxing AWS DataSync

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Your toolbox should contain AWS DataSync, a service to synchronize data between all kinds of locations. Copy data between S3, EFS, and FSx. On top of that, DataSync works with on-premises locations like NFS, SMB, and more.

#013 Next Generation Load Balancing

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AWS announced an important update for the Application Load Balancer (ALB) in November 2020: Support for gRPC and HTTP/2. This video includes a demo of a gRPC service running behind an ALB.

#012 How to configure SAML for AWS SSO

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Learn how to configure identity federation for AWS Single Sign On (SSO) with SAML. This videos includes demos for Google Workspace and Azure AD.

#011 CodeBuild Report Groups 101

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In this video, you learn to capture test and coverage results in CodeBuild. Making unit test results and code coverage visible helps your team to write high-quality code. And I promise CodeBuild Report Groups are not hard to integrate!

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Staying ahead of the game with Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a challenge. Our weekly videos and online events provide independent insights into the world of cloud. Subscribe to cloudonaut plus to get access to our exclusive videos and online events.

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Recent posts

We are publishing blog post weekly. Subscribe to stay up to date. Browse our archive of 291 posts.

2020 in Review

The year is coming to an end. We want to say thank you to our clients, partners, supporters, and readers. We are fortunate that our business is growing steadily even during the pandemic. In this blog post, we look back on the past year and dare a look a...

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What's the CO² footprint of your architecture?

Fighting climate change is one of the biggest challenges of our days. When designing an architecture, there are many important factors to consider: security, reliability, performance and costs. I’d like to add another factor to that list: the CO² footpr...

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[plus] Unboxing AWS DataSync

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re:Invent 2020: Recap of Werner Vogels's Keynote

Werner Vogels’s keynote was a blast and definitely the highlight of re:Invent 2020. Michael and I are going through the announced features and services. As usual, we also take a look at the technical details. CloudShell VPC Reachability Analyzer Fault ...

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[plus] Next Generation Load Balancing: ALB with gRPC and HTTP/2

AWS announced an important update for the Application Load Balancer (ALB) in November 2020: Support for gRPC and HTTP/2. HTTP/2 comes with request multiplexing over a single TCP connection, header compression (HPACK) which reduces network utilization, a...

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3½ ways to workaround missing CloudFormation support

Are you following the Infrastructure as Code approach using CloudFormation? If so, I bet you encountered a situation where CloudFormation misses support for a service’s latest features. I run into those issues weekly! So what can we do about it? Do yo...

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Become a Docker on AWS professional!

Our book Rapid Docker on AWS is designed for DevOps engineers and web developers who want to run dockerized web applications on AWS. We lead you with many examples: From dockerizing your application to Continuous Deployment and Infrastructure as Code on AWS. No prior knowledge of Docker and AWS is required. Get the first chapter for free!

Recent podcast episodes

We drop a podcast episode every other week. Subscribe to the podcast.

#36 re:Invent 2020: Recap of Werner Vogels's Keynote

Werner Vogels's keynote was a blast and definitely the highlight of re:Invent 2020. Michael and I are going through the announced features and services. As usual, we also take a look at the technical details.

Continue listening

#35 3½ ways to workaround missing CloudFormation support

Are you following the Infrastructure as Code approach using CloudFormation? If so, I bet you encountered a situation where CloudFormation misses support for a service's latest features. I run into those issues weekly! So what can we do about it?

Continue listening

#34 A recap of the re:Invent 2020 Keynote with Andy Jassy

Andreas Wittig and Michael Wittig from cloudonaut are discussing Andy Jassy's keynote from re:Invent 2020. The focus is on the newly announced services and features: ECS Anywhere, EBS volumes (gp3), Aurora Serverless v3, Lambda Container Support, and ma...

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#33 ECS vs. Fargate: What's the difference?

The Elastic Container Service (ECS) is Amazon's container orchestration service. Besides that there is Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) the managed Kubernetes offering by AWS. Both container clusters support EC2 and Fargate as the underlying compute eng...

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Level up, strengthen your AWS skills.

Our book Amazon Web Services in Action is a comprehensive introduction to computing, storing, and networking in the AWS cloud. You'll find clear, relevant coverage of all the essential AWS services, emphasizing best practices for security, high availability, and scalability. Get the first chapter for free!

Most popular blog posts

This is what our readers have enjoyed most in the last three months.

Use multiple AWS accounts, but keep it simple!

Getting started with AWS is a challenge. Unlimited possibilities, competing solutions, and distractions. Even the first step to create an AWS account requires careful planning. AWS marketers promote the AWS Landing Zone solution. Consulting partners add...

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Seamless EC2 monitoring with the Unified CloudWatch Agent

Shipping logs and metrics from an EC2 instance to CloudWatch was painful in the past. By default, you only get metrics about CPU utilization, disk and network IO. The missing pieces are metrics about memory and disk usage and logs. Plenty of different o...

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Advanced AWS Networking: Pitfalls That You Should Avoid

AWS offers shiny and powerful networking services. However, you should know about the pitfalls when designing advanced networking architectures for AWS. I will share some pitfalls that came to my attention when consulting clients to get the most out of ...

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What's the best AWS Compute option for your project?

There are many good reasons why you should move to the cloud and AWS in particular. Benefit from the latest innovations or consume sophisticated technology as a commodity (relational databases, Hadoop clusters, data warehouses, …) to lower your time to ...

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AWS Cost Optimization 101

The beginning of the year is the perfect time to clean up and optimize. This also applies to your AWS bill. I’ve composed practical tips on how to cut costs with small effort. The good thing about AWS: you typically pay per usage. The bad thing about A...

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Resilient task scheduling with ECS Fargate

Many applications use scheduled jobs to automate recurring tasks, such as: Generating and sending a monthly report. Disabling users who haven’t logged in for more than 365 days. Deleting stale data from the database. Doing so is simple, as long as an...

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Andreas & Michael Wittig

About us

We are independent consultants, technical writers, and programming founders. All these activities have to do with AWS. And by the way, we are brothers too.

In 2009, we joined the same company as software developers. Three years later, we were looking for a way to deploy our software—an online banking platform—in an agile way. We got excited about the possibilities in the cloud and the DevOps movement. It’s no wonder we ended up migrating the whole infrastructure of Tullius Walden Bank to AWS. This was a first in the finance industry, at least in Germany! Since 2015, we have accelerated the cloud journeys of startups, mid-sized companies, and enterprises. We have penned books like Amazon Web Services in Action and Rapid Docker on AWS, we regularly update our blog, and we are contributing to the Open Source community. Besides running a 2-headed consultancy, we are entrepreneurs building Software-as-a-Service products.

We are available for projects.

Hire us