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The AWS Security Journey (2021)
A lot has happened in the area of security at AWS over the years. By now, AWS has released an exhaustive range of security services and the role of the security officer has changed significantly. This article looks back and forecasts where the journey w...
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How to Replicate Your Data with DynamoDB Global Tables
In my last post about Multi-Region AWS Architectures, I discussed how you could reduce end-user latency and increase availability by running your application in multiple regions. I compared AWS services that help you to run your application in various r...
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Multi-Region AWS Architectures
Running an application in multiple availability zones (data centers) in a single region is a best practice when architecting on AWS. Interested in learning more about multi-AZ? Take a look at our previous post here. Depending on your availability or lat...
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Choosing the best way to scale EC2 instances on demand
Migrating workloads into the cloud — and specifically to AWS — comes with many advantages. You can operate workloads in new ways. When you only pay for what you use and add capacity within minutes, the world of auto-scaling opens up. When your workload ...
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Calculate AWS Costs in Detail
Calculating AWS costs upfront is a challenge. To get accurate numbers, you have to understand the pricing model of the used AWS services. A pricing model consists of one or many pricing dimensions. E.g., GBs stored, number of requests, etc. Keep in mind...
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Getting Started with Free Templates for AWS CloudFormation
Writing CloudFormation templates from scratch is a lot of work. You will run into many issues along the way: the documentation is incomplete, magic values are required, unsupported combinations of attributes, etc. The feedback cycles are long. In the en...
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Unboxing S3 Object Lambda
Amazon S3 Object Lambda offers a way to execute a Lambda function when someone wants to download a file (GetObject) from an S3 bucket. You can implement whatever logic you wish and return any data as the response via the WriteGetObjectResponse API. Keep...
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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
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#41 Getting Started with Free Templates for AWS CloudFormation
Writing CloudFormation templates from scratch is a lot of work. You will run into many issues along the way: the documentation is incomplete, magic values are required, unsupported combinations of attributes, etc. The feedback cycles are long. In the en...
Continue listening#40 Review: AWS Fault Injection Simulator (FIS)
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...
Continue listening#39 Serverless in the Enterprise
We coached developers building their first Serverless applications for a large company recently and want to share our learnings and observations with you.
Continue listening#38 5 good reasons not to get AWS certified
I completed my first AWS certification in 2014: AWS Solutions Architect Associate. During the following years, I accomplished all five associate and professional certificates. However, Michael and I decided not to renew our AWS certifications about a ye...
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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.
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...
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Cheap, 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...
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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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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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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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Unusual 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 325 articles: small tips and tricks, best practices, and service reviews. We enjoy writing about all things AWS a lot.
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