Welcome to cloudonaut
Your launchpad for Amazon Web Services
High-quality & independent AWS content since 2015. By Andreas & Michael Wittig. We published 331 articles, 42 podcast episodes, and 15 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
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 blog post, I outline the mindset you need to build on AWS successfully. ...
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Subscribe to stay up to date. Browse our archive of 331 posts.
EBS Snapshot Pitfalls: Does your backup withstand reality?
Does your disaster recovery plan deliver what it promises? Here are three reasons why your plan won’t stand up to reality. Learn about common pitfalls when backing up EC2 instances with the help of EBS snapshots. A crash-consistent snapshot leads to da...
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Sponsored Authentic and hands-on AWS consulting. Join superluminar!
In 2015 - after building on Amazon Web Services for two years - I made a big decision. I wanted to become a consultant focusing on AWS. One of the best career decisions I have ever made. As a consultant, I worked with many different people in different ...
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Celebrating five years of marbot
Five years ago, we released marbot - ChatOps for AWS . Back in the day, marbot connected Amazon CloudWatch and Slack to spread alerts among your team members. Today, marbot configures AWS monitoring rules, receives alerts from any AWS service, and provi...
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Containers on AWS: ECS, EKS, and Fargate
The container landscape in general and on AWS in particular is changing quickly. AWS releases new services and features to deploy containers constantly. Currently, the most interesting options are: Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Elastic Kubernetes ...
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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...
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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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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 CloudFormation vs Terraform 2021
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 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 15 videos.
How I use AWS Security Hub
AWS: Real-world CodePipeline CI/CD Examples
Running containers on spot infrastructure in AWS
AWS Cognito Under the Hood
Please support our work!
We have published 331 articles, 42 podcast episodes, and 15 videos. It's all free and means a lot of work in our spare time.
$6,000.00 will help us to write in-depth service reviews and comparisons in 2022! With your help, we can continue to produce independent & high-quality content focused on AWS.
Thanks to Alan Leech, Alex DeBrie, e9e4e5f0faef, Jaap-Jan Frans, Jens Gehring, jhoadley, Kamil Oboril, Ken Snyder, 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 42 episodes.
#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#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.
Start listening#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...
Start 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...
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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 331 articles, 42 podcast episodes, and 15 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, e9e4e5f0faef, Jaap-Jan Frans, Jens Gehring, jhoadley, Kamil Oboril, Ken Snyder, 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!
Support us