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Databases on AWS

Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS, proclaimed #DBFreedom, aka use whatever database you like. AWS offers them all. At least, that’s what AWS marketing wants us to understand. In the real world, AWS offers a wide variety of databases for different use cases. Your j...

Anonymize CloudFront Access Logs

Amazon CloudFront can upload access log files to an S3 bucket. By default, CloudFront logs the IP address of the client. Optionally, cookies could be logged as well. If EU citizens access your CloudFront distribution, you have to process personally iden...

Building with EC2: 10 Tips for the Successful Cloud Architect

Despite the Kubernetes and Serverless hypes, the vast majority of cloud workloads still happen on virtual machines. AWS offers the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service, where you can launch virtual machines (AWS calls them instances). The EC2 serv...

AWS Account Structure: Think twice before using AWS Organizations

What is an AWS account? I like to use the following two ways to describe the concept of an AWS account: a tenant in Amazon’s multi-tenant cloud or a virtual data center. When running multiple workloads and environments using numerous AWS accounts is the...

Top 14 Must-Haves for Your AWS Architecture Checklist

After analyzing the requirements of your application, you came up with an AWS architecture. Good job! This blog post contains a checklist helping you to validate your architecture. Make sure that you haven’t forgotten any important aspects. This is a ...

CloudWatch Metrics & Alarms reloaded

Amazon CloudWatch improved significantly over the years. It’s time to look at its monitoring capabilities again. CloudWatch is an excellent starting point to implement enhanced monitoring on AWS. In this blog post, I demonstrate what you can do with Clo...

Seamless EC2 monitoring with the Unified CloudWatch Agent

Shipping logs and metrics from an EC2 instance to CloudWatch was painful in the past. By default, you only get metrics about CPU utilization, disk and network IO. The missing pieces are metrics about memory and disk usage and logs. Plenty of different o...

Advanced AWS Networking: Pitfalls That You Should Avoid

AWS offers shiny and powerful networking services. However, you should know about the pitfalls when designing advanced networking architectures for AWS. I will share some pitfalls that came to my attention when consulting clients to get the most out of ...

How to analyze and reduce S3 storage usage?

S3 is an object store, not a file system. Object storage comes with significant advantages: unlimited storage capacity, high availability, and durability. However, there are some disadvantages too. For example, it is cumbersome to calculate the storage ...

On the way to sustainable open source projects

Open Source software is the heart of the modern world. Why do we love open source? Maybe, because we can review the source code? Or because we can modify it? The honest answer is: because it is free. Which is contradictory in a capitalist world, isn’t i...