2019: Review and Outlook

The year is coming to an end. We want to say “thank you” to our clients, partners, supporters, and readers. In this blog post, we look back on the past year and dare a look at the next year.

Review

We love blogging and published 53 articles on cloudonaut.io this year. Unbelievable, but those articles have been read more than 1,000,000 times in 2019.

Our favorite articles this year:

• Review: AWS Backup - A centralized place for managing backups?
• AWS SLA: Are you able to keep your availability promise?
• ECS vs. Fargate: What’s the difference?
• 6 new ways to reduce your AWS bill with little effort
• How to avoid S3 data leaks?

We are proud of the projects we were able to implement for our clients this year:

• Coaching teams to get started with AWS in an enterprise environment.
• Bootstrapping the infrastructure for several startups.
• Designing a Serverless architecture for a mid-size company.
• Automating the deployment process for various clients.
• Reviewing cloud infrastructures with a focus on security, cost-effectiveness, and reliability for all kinds of organizations.
• Implementing a Serverless application for a retail business.

By the way, we have relaunched widdix.net, the website of our boutique consulting firm.

Our incident management chatbot marbot is available in the AWS Marketplace since June. On top of that, we improved our integrations with various AWS services to simplify monitoring your cloud infrastructure as much as possible.

In August, we launched the cloudonaut podcast. Since then, we released ten episodes and received motivating feedback from the community. Make sure you have subscribed to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

We released our 2nd book Rapid Docker on AWS in October. The book is written for DevOps engineers and web developers who want to run dockerized web applications on AWS with minimal effort and overhead.

We benefit from Open Source software every day and are happy to contribute to the community ourselves. Our most important projects are:

• cfn-modules: Rapid CloudFormation: modular, production ready, open source (133 stars and 17 forks)
• widdix/aws-cf-templates: Free Templates for AWS CloudFormation (1700 stars and 815 forks)
• widdix/aws-ec2-ssh: Manage AWS EC2 SSH access with IAM (734 stars and 261 forks)
• widdix/aws-s3-virusscan: Free Antivirus for S3 Buckets (306 stars and 85 forks)

Outlook

We plan to write another book in 2020. We haven’t decided on the topic and title yet. Please write in to tell us about the book you want to read from us next year.

In February 2020, we will launch the Rapid Docker on AWS online seminar, a 4-week author-led workshop.

We will build a software product next year as well. We are currently thinking about investing more energy into marbot or to create a new product from scratch. One idea is to develop a portfolio analysis solution for semi-professional investors.

On top of that, we are looking for projects where we can bring in our expertise as freelancers. We would be especially pleased to be able to work on a project with the following focus:

• Building a cloud infrastructure on the Google Cloud Platform.
• Implementing a Serverless application on AWS.
• Coaching a team to build a deployment pipeline (CI/CD) for AWS.
• Setting up a Serverless data pipeline and analytics platform on AWS.

If you are looking for help with a project in 2020, please let us know. Our calendar fills up quickly.

That’s it from us for 2019. We are taking a 2-week break. See you in 2020.