2018 in Review

The year 2018 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 for 2018:

• 500,000 views
• 278,000 readers
• 37 articles published
• 40,000 written words

Top 10 articles in 2018:

• EC2 Network Performance Cheat Sheet
• EKS vs. ECS: orchestrating containers on AWS
• Migrating to Amazon Linux 2
• AWS Monitoring Primer
• Configure your CloudFormation managed infrastructure with Parameter Store and CodePipeline
• My mental model of AWS
• Restricting Access to EC2 Instances Based on Tags
• Cleaning up an S3 bucket with the help of Athena
• Tweaking RDS database performance and ElastiCache
• Dead man’s switch with CloudWatch

Book

We published the second edition of Amazon Web Services in Action as printed book and ebook (PDF) in 2018. As AWS is iterating fast a lot has changed since the first edition in 2015 we have completely revised and updated all chapters. On top of that, we have added three entirely new chapters to the second edition: Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), Amazon ElastiCache, and AWS Lambda.

Product

We made massive progress with marbot, our easy-going incident management tool for AWS in 2018.

• Improved conversations with marbot by reducing latency.
• Introduced aggregation - also known as deduplication - of alerts.
• Added integrations for OpsWorks and Elastic Beanstalk alerts.
• Implemented auto-close for CloudWatch alarms.
• Improved reliability, for example by introducing rate limits for alerts.

Thanks a lot to all our customers for supporting the development of marbot.

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.

• cfn-modules: Rapid CloudFormation: modular, production ready, open source (53 stars)
• widdix/aws-cf-templates: Free Templates for AWS CloudFormation (1205 stars and 499 forks)
• widdix/aws-ec2-ssh: Manage AWS EC2 SSH access with IAM (609 stars and 207 forks)
• widdix/aws-s3-virusscan: Free Antivirus for S3 Buckets (222 stars and 56 forks)
• widdix/cfn-create-or-update: Create or update CloudFormation stack also if no updates are to be performed (45 stars and 11 forks)
• widdix/cloudwatch-alarm-to-slack: Send CloudWatch Alarms to Slack with AWS Lambda (19 stars and 4 fork)

Thanks to all users and contributors for your feedback and support.

Consulting Projects

We enjoy accompanying our consulting clients with our AWS and DevOps expertise. In 2018 we have worked together with small startups, medium-sized companies, and big enterprises.

A few technologies that we have used in 2018 to solve the real-world challenges of our clients:

• Docker on AWS with ECS and EKS
• Deployment Pipelines with CodePipeline
• Infrastructure as Code with CloudFormation
• Serverless with Lambda, API Gateway, Cognito, and DynamoDB
• Storing and querying hierarchical data with Cloud Directory
• Event-driven architectures with Kinesis and Lambda
• Authorization concept with IAM and Organizations

Thanks to our consulting clients for putting their trust into our expertise.

We wish you a Happy New Year.