2017 in Review

The year 2017 is coming to an end. We want to thank our readers, customers, supporters, and partners. It was a pleasure to be part of an inspiring community.

Blog

We share how-tos, lessons learned and opinions on our blog cloudonaut.io. Thanks for reading, sharing, and providing feedback!

A few facts and numbers.

• 432,000 pages viewed
• 220,000 people visiting the site
• 39 articles published
• 40,000 written words

The following articles have been read the most in 2017.

• Integrate SQS and Lambda: serverless architecture for asynchronous workloads
• AWS Security Primer
• Create a serverless RESTful API with API Gateway, CloudFormation, Lambda, and DynamoDB
• Create a serverless RESTful API with API Gateway, Swagger, Lambda, and DynamoDB
• Manage AWS EC2 SSH access with IAM
• WordPress on AWS: you are holding it wrong
• CloudFormation vs. Terraform
• 5 AWS mistakes you should avoid
• Serverless image resizing at any scale
• 6 tips and tricks for AWS command-line ninjas

We do like most the following articles published in 2017.

• AWS Velocity Series
• Your Lambda function might execute twice. Be prepared!
• A simple way to manage log messages from containers: CloudWatch Logs
• Engaging your users with AWS Step Functions
• Passwordless database authentication for AWS Lambda
• CloudWatch is neglected: Why is the control room empty?
• ECS vs. Kubernets: same same but different
• Lessons learned: Serverless Chatbot architecture for marbot
• Evolution of the EC2 Network Performance: m3, m4, and m5

Book

AWS is innovating fast and a lot changed since we have published our book Amazon Web Services in Action in 2015. Therefore, we decided to revise our book in 2017. We are glad to announce, that we have revised all 14 chapters of our book and also added three more chapters covering Lambda, ElastiCache, and Elastic File System (EFS). The 2nd edition of Amazon Web Services in Action is going to production within the next few weeks. A preview of our book is already available. We’d like to thank all the readers of our book.

Buy Amazon Web Services in Action, 2nd edition.

Product

We have made massive progress with marbot, our chatbot ensuring you never miss an alert from Amazon Web Services in 2017.

• Introducing marbot plus, a paid plan offering additional features and integrations.
• Adding integrations to receive alerts from CloudWatch Events, ElastiCache Notifications, RDS Events, Trusted Advisor Updates, …
• Providing generic endpoints to receive alerts via HTTPS or email.
• Aggregating and deduplicating alerts.

We’d like to thank all teams who invited marbot to join them via Slack.

Open Source

We do profit from Open Source in our day-to-day work. That’s why we are trying to give something back to the community by sharing the following projects with you.

• widdix/aws-cf-templates: Free Templates for AWS CloudFormation (712 stars and 275 forks)
• widdix/aws-ec2-ssh: Manage AWS EC2 SSH access with IAM (336 stars and 130 forks)
• widdix/aws-s3-virusscan: Free Antivirus for S3 Buckets (131 stars and 28 forks)
• widdix/cfn-create-or-update: Create or update CloudFormation stack also if no updates are to be performed (25 stars and 7 forks)
• widdix/cloudwatch-alarm-to-slack: Send CloudWatch Alarms to Slack with AWS Lambda (5 stars and 1 fork)

Thanks to all the contributors to one of our Open Source projects.

Consulting Projects

We enjoy supporting our consulting clients with our AWS and DevOps expertise. In 2017 we have worked together with small startups, medium-sized companies, and big enterprises. We’d like to thank our consulting clients for putting their trust into our AWS and DevOps expertise.

A few technologies that we have used in 2017 to solve the real-world challenges of our clients:

• Kubernetes on AWS
• Deployment Pipelines with GitLab
• Infrastructure as Code with CloudFormation and Terraform
• Elastic Container Service (ECS)
• AWS Organisations and IAM
• Deployment Pipelines with Jenkins and SonarQube
• Collecting and processing events with AWS IoT
• Monitoring and Logging with Elasticsearch and Kibana
• Serverless with Lambda, API Gateway, and DynamoDB
• Caching database requests with ElatiCache (Redis)
• Orchestrating Lambda with Step Functions
• Event-driven architectures with Kinesis
• Encrypting data-at-rest with KMS

We wish you a Happy New Year.