
Welcome to cloudonaut
Your launchpad for Amazon Web Services
High-quality & independent AWS content since 2015. By Andreas & Michael Wittig. We published 356 articles, 48 podcast episodes, and 45 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
Monitor VPC NAT gateways with CloudWatch metrics and alarms
Many VPC designs make use of public and private subnets. A NAT gateway is needed to communicate from a private subnet with the Internet. A VPC NAT gateway is a finite resource that can be exhausted. That’s why you need to add monitoring to be alerted i...
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Subscribe to stay up to date. Browse our archive of 356 posts.
CloudFormation cfn-init pitfall: Auto scaling and throttling error rate exceeded
cfn-init is a little helper to install and configure EC2 instances managed with CloudFormation. Lately, I was running into issues when starting a more significant amount of EC2 (let’s say 50) during an auto scaling event. This blog post will teach you w...
Read onSelling an AMI and a CloudFormation template as an alternative to SaaS
We have been selling software through AWS Marketplace since 2019. Selling SaaS is very popular nowadays, and most software vendors are moving to this model. However, we learned that there is a promising alternative to SaaS: Selling software bundled into...
Read onFargate vs. App Runner
What’s the simplest way to run containers on AWS? My first relevant container workload was running on a fleet of EC2 instances managed by ECS. Maintaining and scaling the needed EC2 instances was wasting a lot of my time. So I got very excited when AWS ...
Read onAuthentication at the edge with Lambda@Edge and Cognito
For many years, we used a hosting partner for serving the Rapid Docker on AWS Video Course. When someone bought the video course, we created a user account with our partner. The hosting partner provided a website to watch the videos and a login form. Fo...
Read onBuilder's Diary Vol. 1: Successful Cloud Migrations
Get insights into the day-to-day challenges of builders. In this issue, Monika Oblonczek from our partner tecRacer talks about how cloud migrations succeed. Monika’s career is very exciting as she transitioned from legal linguistics into cloud computing...
Read onALB vs. NLB: Which AWS load balancer fits your needs?
Which load balancer fits my workload best? As is often the case, AWS offers more than one solution. Read on to learn whether to use the Application Load Balancer (ALB) or the Network Load Balancer (NLB) to distribute incoming requests among a fleet of v...
Read onUpdated CloudFormation vs Terraform 2022
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...
Read onUpdated 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...
Read onUpdated 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 45 videos.
AWS-to-go Vol. 2: WordPress in Fifteen Minutes - an Example
Ask Me Anything: AWS Marketplace Seller
AWS Marketplace: Getting started with an AMI + CloudFormation product
Unboxing AWS Airflow

Please support our work!
We have published 356 articles, 48 podcast episodes, and 45 videos. It's all free and means a lot of work in our spare time.
Thanks to Alan Leech, Alex DeBrie, ANTHONY RAITI, Christopher Hipwell, Jaap-Jan Frans, Jason Yorty, Jeff Finley, Jens Gehring, jhoadley, Johannes Grumböck, John Culkin, Jonas Mellquist, Juraj Martinka, Kamil Oboril, Ken Snyder, Markus Ellers, Ross Mohan, Ross Mohan, sam onaga, Satyendra Sharma, Shawn Tolidano, Thorsten Hoeger, Todd Valentine, Victor Grenu, 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 48 episodes.
#49 AWS-to-go Vol. 2: WordPress in Fifteen Minutes - an Example
Get started with AWS or broaden your knowledge while walking, biking, running, driving, or whenever you enjoy listening to podcasts.
Start listening#48 AWS-to-go Vol. 1: What's Amazon Web Services?
Get started with AWS or broaden your knowledge while walking, biking, running, driving, or whenever you enjoy listening to podcasts.
Start listening#47 Builder's Diary Vol. 1: Successful Cloud Migrations
Get insights into the day-to-day challenges of builders. In this issue, Monika Oblonczek from our partner tecRacer talks about how cloud migrations succeed.
Start listening#46 Review: Aurora Serverless v2
I was excited when AWS announced Aurora Serverless at re:Invent 2017. Disappointment followed shortly after. Even after Aurora Serverless became a generally available service in August 2018, it was missing important features like multi-AZ deployments an...
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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...
Read onCheap, 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...
Read onHow 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...
Read onWhat'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...
Read on3½ 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...
Read onUnusual 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 356 articles, 48 podcast episodes, and 45 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, ANTHONY RAITI, Christopher Hipwell, Jaap-Jan Frans, Jason Yorty, Jeff Finley, Jens Gehring, jhoadley, Johannes Grumböck, John Culkin, Jonas Mellquist, Juraj Martinka, Kamil Oboril, Ken Snyder, Markus Ellers, Ross Mohan, Ross Mohan, sam onaga, Satyendra Sharma, Shawn Tolidano, Thorsten Hoeger, Todd Valentine, Victor Grenu, 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!
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