EC2 Checklist: 7 things to do after launching an instance

Launching an EC2 instance takes minutes. Keeping your virtual machines secure and maintaining your VMs is more work. In this blog post, I share seven things to do after launching a Linux, Windows, or macOS instance: Configure remote access with SSM Ses...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

Updated Comparing API Gateways on AWS

Of the different API gateways offered by AWS, which option fits your needs? An API Gateway is “a server that acts as an API front-end, receives API requests, enforces throttling and security policies, passes requests to the back-end service, and then pa...

DNSSEC with AWS Route 53: Protecting the core of the Internet

All you need to know about encrypting AWS S3 buckets

AWS Client VPN: Connected with the Cloud

AWS - VPC Debugging

#42 EC2 Checklist: 7 things to do after launching an instance

Launching an EC2 instance takes minutes. Keeping your virtual machines secure and maintaining your VMs is more work. In this episode, I share seven things to do after launching a Linux, Windows, or macOS instance.

#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...

#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...

#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.