
Welcome to cloudonaut
Your launchpad for Amazon Web Services
High-quality & independent AWS content since 2015. By Andreas & Michael Wittig. We published 345 articles, 45 podcast episodes, and 37 videos. It's all free. We enjoy sharing our AWS knowledge with you.
Start readingWelcome to cloudonaut
Your launchpad for Amazon Web Services
High-quality & independent AWS content since 2015. By Andreas & Michael Wittig. We enjoy sharing our AWS knowledge with you.
Start reading
Automate CloudFormation StackSets with CloudFormation
CloudFormation StackSets rollout CloudFormation stacks to all or some of your AWS accounts. Also, stack sets allow you to deploy stacks to multiple regions. Therefore, CloudFormation stack sets are a great way to deploy baseline configurations to multip...
Read onRecent posts
Subscribe to stay up to date. Browse our archive of 345 posts.
Review: Aurora Serverless v2
I was excited when AWS announced Aurora Serverless at re:Invent 2017. Disappointment followed shortly after. Even after Aurora Serverless became a generally available service in August 2018, it missed important features like multi-AZ deployments and rea...
Read onLaunching cloudonaut talent
We launched our blog cloudonaut in 2015, and published more than 340 articles and started to record and publish a podcast episodes and videos since then. However, cloudonaut was always a side project for us. Because we would like to put more energy into...
Read onAmazon Web Services in Action 3rd Edition: Early Access
About seven years ago, Michael and I started to write a book about Amazon Web Services. We were beginning our consulting business, and writing a book seemed like an excellent way to demonstrate our expertise. Our publisher Manning launched our book Amaz...
Read onApplication Authentication and Authorization on AWS
In this blog post, you will learn to implement authentication and authorization for your own HTTP(S)-based applications on AWS. Most applications offer some functionality only to authenticated clients. A client can be a human or a machine. Humans usuall...
Read onHow to create a security group allowing traffic from CloudFront only?
It is one of those problems for which there has been no satisfactory solution for years. How do you ensure that only CloudFront is granted access to an Elastic Load Balancer - CLB, ALB, or NLB? Without the ability to restrict incoming traffic, all of Cl...
Read onSanction Russia: Block traffic using CloudFront Geo Restriction
Russia attacked a sovereign state this week. Most states condemn the attack and impose sanctions. Among other things, sanctions are intended to mobilize the Russian population to rise up against their aristocrat Putin. As of today, cloudonaut is no long...
Read onUpdated CloudFormation vs Terraform 2022
The most reliable way to automate creating, updating, and deleting your cloud resources is to describe the target state of your infrastructure and use a tool to apply it to the current state of your infrastructure (see Understanding Infrastructure as Co...
Read onUpdated Amazon ECR vs. Docker Hub vs. GitHub Container Registry
Have you worked with a Linux package manager like apt or yum before? A container registry is similar, but instead of packages, it distributes container images. A container registry is a crucial aspect of a containerized workflow and infrastructure. This...
Read onUpdated Managing application secrets: SSM Parameter Store vs. Secrets Manager
Many applications interact with external or internal systems like databases or REST APIs. When your application talks to another system, it usually authenticates with a secret, e.g., an API key, username + password, or a certificate. This leads to the q...
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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 videos
Subscribe to stay up to date. Browse our archive of 37 videos.
Unboxing AWS Backup for Amazon S3
#44 AWS Security: Stephen Kuenzli and Andreas Wittig on IAM
Connect to your EC2 instance using SSH the modern way
Calculate AWS Costs in Detail: S3 VirusScan Calculation (2021)

Please support our work!
We have published 345 articles, 45 podcast episodes, and 37 videos. It's all free and means a lot of work in our spare time.
Thanks to Alan Leech, Alex DeBrie, ANTHONY RAITI, Jaap-Jan Frans, Jason Yorty, Jeff Finley, Jens Gehring, jhoadley, Johannes Grumböck, John Culkin, Jonas Mellquist, Juraj Martinka, Kamil Oboril, Ken Snyder, Ross Mohan, Ross Mohan, sam onaga, Shawn Tolidano, Thorsten Hoeger, Todd Valentine, and all anonymous supporters for your help! We also want to thank all supporters who purchased a cloudonaut t-shirt.
Support usRecent podcast episodes
Subscribe to stay up to date. Browse our archive of 45 episodes.
#46 Review: Aurora Serverless v2
I was excited when AWS announced Aurora Serverless at re:Invent 2017. Disappointment followed shortly after. Even after Aurora Serverless became a generally available service in August 2018, it was missing important features like multi-AZ deployments an...
Start listening#45 The AWS Cookbook
Andreas invited John Culkin and Mike Zazon to talk about their latest book: the AWS Cookbook which includes 70 self-contained recipes to help you creatively solve common AWS challenges you'll encounter on your cloud journey. This show includes the foll...
Start listening#44 AWS Security: Stephen Kuenzli and Andreas Wittig on IAM
Stephen Kuenzli and I lead several cloud migration projects. In this conversation, we shared our learnings focusing on AWS security and IAM (Identity and Access Management). The result is advice and inspiration that will help you in your daily work. Our...
Start listening#43 AWS Architect Mindset
Architecting applications on AWS is challenging. On the one hand, you need a broad understanding of AWS services. On the other hand, you have to know the details as well. In this episode, Michael outlines the mindset you need to build on AWS successfully.
Start listening
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.
Review: AWS Fault Injection Simulator (FIS) – Chaos as a Service?
AWS allows us to run applications distributed across EC2 instances and availability zones. By adding load balancers or message queues to the architecture, we can achieve fault tolerance or high availability. But how can we test that our system can survi...
Read onCheap, Durable, Fast. How to choose an EBS volume type?
Elastic Block Storage (EBS) provides solid state drives (SSD) and hard disk drives (HDD) for EC2 instances. The virtual machine accesses the persistent storage via the network. In December 2020, AWS announced another volume type called General Purpose S...
Read onHow 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...
Read onWhat'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...
Read on3½ 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...
Read onUnusual AWS Architectures
AWS provides many building blocks. As architects, we have to choose the right building blocks to construct our systems. But sometimes, the proper building block is not available, and we have to make compromises. In this blog post, I show four unusual AW...
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Hej, Andreas & Michael here!
We launched the cloudonaut blog in 2015. Since then, we have published 345 articles, 45 podcast episodes, and 37 videos. It's all free and means a lot of work in our spare time. We enjoy sharing our AWS knowledge with you.
Thanks to Alan Leech, Alex DeBrie, ANTHONY RAITI, Jaap-Jan Frans, Jason Yorty, Jeff Finley, Jens Gehring, jhoadley, Johannes Grumböck, John Culkin, Jonas Mellquist, Juraj Martinka, Kamil Oboril, Ken Snyder, Ross Mohan, Ross Mohan, sam onaga, Shawn Tolidano, Thorsten Hoeger, Todd Valentine, and all anonymous supporters for your help! We also want to thank all supporters who purchased a cloudonaut t-shirt. It gives us great pleasure to send our t-shirts all over the world.
With your help, we can continue to produce independent & high-quality content focused on AWS. Please support us!
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