Cloudonaut Teaser

Welcome to cloudonaut

Your launchpad for Amazon Web Services (AWS)

By Andreas & Michael Wittig. Since 2015, we published 380 articles, 82 podcast episodes, and 85 videos.

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Welcome to cloudonaut

Your launchpad for Amazon Web Services (AWS)

By Andreas & Michael Wittig.

Start reading
Cloudonaut Teaser

Protect Amazon Connect from viruses and malware by scanning attachments

Four years ago, we stumbled into Amazon Connect. In essence, Amazon Connect allows your users to reach your organization represented by agents via phone or chat. While chatting, Amazon Connect allows users and agents to upload attachments. For many year...

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Worldwide availability of EC2 instance types

The promise sounds tempting; with AWS, you can roll out your infrastructure in 28 regions worldwide. Indeed, it is an eye-opening moment when rolling out the same infrastructure into multiple regions to serve users in different parts of the world. Howev...

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How to monitor container workloads running on ECS and Fargate?

How do you monitor a container workload running on ECS (Elastic Container Service) and Fargate with on-board resources? Here are the prioritized aspects when it comes to monitoring containers on AWS. Event-driven monitoring with EventBridge Monitoring ...

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Using DynamoDB Entity Store for cleaner TypeScript code

DynamoDB is a cloud-hosted NoSQL database from Amazon Web Services (AWS). DynamoDB is popular for two main reasons: It scales extremely effectively with little operational effort Since it is a serverless service it is also cheap, simple, and quick to r...

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The Lambda monitoring blind spot

After a customer complained that a feature of marbot, our monitoring solution for AWS was not working as expected, I started debugging the issue. First, I checked the CloudWatch alarms we use to monitor all Lambda functions. All CloudWatch alarms were i...

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A future-proof Terraform provider definition

When defining the version of a Terraform provider, do not use > or => conditions. You will run into troubles caused by breaking changes with the next major release. Instead, lock the major version of the Terraform provider by using a ~> conditi...

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Migrating to AWS JavaScript SDK v3: Lessons Learned

There’s work coming your way! Node.js 16 reached end-of-life on September 11th, 2023. Also, the AWS Lambda runtime environment for Node.js 18 upgraded to v3 of the AWS SDK for JavaScript. So to upgrade Lambda functions from Node.js 16 to 18, you have to...

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Updated CloudFormation vs Terraform in 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...

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Updated 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...

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Updated 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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[cloudonaut podcast] Vol. 83 - EC2 Instance Types + Amazon Connect malware scanning + S3 Object Lock

[cloudonaut podcast] Vol. 82 - Terraform 1.6 + Lambda Monitoring

cloudonaut Podcast #081

cloudonaut Podcast #080

#083 One region to rule them all

Which EC2 instance families are available in which region? How protect agents connected through Amazon Connect from malware uploaded by customers? What is S3 Object Lock all about?

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#082 Generating boring CloudFormation templates with the CDK

Should you upgrade to Terraform 1.6 already? How to avoid blind spots when monitoring Lambda functions? An unusual way to utilize the CDK.

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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...

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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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Andreas Wittig and Michael Wittig

Hej, Andreas & Michael here!

We launched the cloudonaut blog in 2015. Since then, we have published 380 articles, 82 podcast episodes, and 85 videos.

Besides sharing our learnings about all things AWS on cloudonaut, we're currently working on bucketAV, HyperEnv for GitHub Actions, and marbot.

To support our work on cloudonaut, please subscribe to our newsletter, podcast, or YouTube channel and share our content with your friends and coworkers.