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Running containers on spot infrastructure
Running workloads on spot infrastructure is significantly cheaper. You can reduce your bill by 50% or more. Keep in mind that spot workloads can be terminated at any time. If you are lucky, you will be noticed 2 minutes upfront to shut down gracefully. ...
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#029 Running containers on spot infrastructure
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Running workloads on spot infrastructure is significantly cheaper. You can reduce your bill by 50% or more. Keep in mind that spot workloads can be terminated at any time. If you are lucky, you will be noticed 2 minutes upfront to shut down gracefully. ...
#027 Defining IAM Policies with Terraform
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Are you still defining IAM policies using heredoc syntax (EOF ... EOF) or jsonencode()? You can do better! As a result, terraform validate can tell you about typos before you apply them, and you get better auto-complete support from your IDE. In this vi...
#026 Cognito Under the Hood
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Have you ever implemented a user database and authentication layer yourself? There are a lot of things to get right: Hashing and salting passwords, multi factor authentication, brute force attacks, and many more. That's why I recommend to use a producti...
#025 A Deep Dive into AWS CloudTrail
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Who made changes to sensitive parts of your cloud infrastructure? Capture audit logs with AWS CloudTrail. Learn how to analyze the audit logs with the help of CloudWatch Logs Insights or Athena. On top of that, we discuss how to rollout CloudTrail to al...
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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 onProgramming your CDN: CloudFront and Lambda@Edge
Minimizing the load time of your websites and applications is essential for two reasons. First, search engines rank websites based on page load times. Second, users are impatient and might cancel loading your application to jump to a competitor instead....
Read onDefining IAM Policies with Terraform safely
Are you still defining IAM policies using heredoc syntax (<<EOF ... EOF) or jsonencode()? You can do better! As a result, terraform validate can tell you about typos before you apply them, and you get better auto-complete support from your IDE. Re...
Read onManaging 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...
Read onWhat Architects Need to Know About Networking on AWS
As an architect, you may not have thought too much about the network management before. At least that’s how it used to be for me. But since I’ve been designing architectures for AWS, network structure has become much more important to me. With Amazon V...
Read onCognito Under the Hood
Have you ever implemented a user database and authentication layer yourself? There are many things to get right: Hashing and salting passwords, multi-factor authentication, brute force attacks, and many more. That’s why I recommend using a production-re...
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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!
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#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...
Continue listening#37 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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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...
Read onAndreas & 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.