#ec2 | Amazon EC2 (2)

All about utilizing and managing virtual machines on AWS.

EC2 Instances 2.0 - Time to Update Your Toolbox

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) has more than 13 years of public history and is one of the oldest AWS services. EC2 is a mature service that reinvented itself many times: From EC2 classic to Amazon VPC. From SSH access to AWS SSM Session Manager. Fr...

Combine CloudWatch metrics for Auto Scaling or to reduce costs

Every part of your AWS infrastructure emits utilization metrics. Amazon CloudWatch collects these metrics and allows you to visualize them as well as to define alarms. AWS announced an exciting new feature allowing you to combine multiple metrics recent...

Reduce your AWS bill with Savings Plans

We are getting used to consuming compute capacity on-demand. The pay-per-use model is an essential benefit of the cloud. However, the cloud provider has to build data centers and buy hardware in advance. Doing so requires capacity planning and upfront i...

EC2 Instance Connect is an insecure default!

Two months before, Michael wrote about why AWS SSM is a trojan horse. Shortly after that, AWS released EC2 Instance Connect, which is even worse. If you use Amazon Linux 2 or Ubuntu, the chances are high that everyone in your AWS account can SSH into ev...

Monitoring EC2 Network Utilization

This post was originally published on the marbot blog. Are you monitoring the network utilization of your EC2 instances? Why not? The network is one of the rare resources that will limit your workload’s maximum throughput: CPU Memory Network Disk GPU...

Goodbye SSH, use AWS Session Manager instead

SSH is great. But the AWS Session Manager - whose full name is AWS Systems Manager Session Manager - matches the needs for interacting with your EC2 instances even better. BenefitsYou should think about replacing SSH with the AWS Session Manager becaus...

AWS SLA: Are you able to keep your availability promise?

Are you offering availability of 99.99% or more to your clients? Bad news, you might not be able to keep your promise! Recently AWS announced a bunch of new Service Level Agreements (SLA). Therefore, it is now possible to calculate the expected availabi...

My mental model of AWS

AWS is a complex system that no one can understand end-to-end? As AWS professionals we still have to deal with the AWS system daily. We design for AWS, and we debug our applications running in AWS. How can we deal with a system that is too complex to un...

EC2 Network Performance of t3

AWS introduced the t3 instance type in August. Time to update the EC2 Network Performance Cheat Sheet. The following table shows the network capabilities of t3 instances. Compared to the last generation t2 there is no difference in the baseline through...

Behind the scenes of the EC2 network performance benchmark

What is the maximum network throughput you can expect from an EC2 instance of type t2.large? How much does the network performance increase when switching from a t2.large to m5.large instance? All these kind of questions are hard to answer, as AWS does ...

Burst credits of t2 EC2 instances need monitoring

EC2 is one of the fundamental services on AWS. If you are not 100% Serverless, your application health depends on the health of your EC2 instances. When I do AWS architecture reviews for our clients, I check that CPU burst capacity is monitored for EC2 ...

Migrating to Amazon Linux 2

I run all my EC2 workloads on Amazon Linux. It comes with a superb AWS integration, a secure default configuration, regular security updates, and I can open AWS Support tickets if I run into any problems. In late December 2017, AWS announced the succes...

EC2 Network Performance Cheat Sheet

What is the maximum network throughput of your EC2 instance? The answer to this question is key to choosing the type of an instance or defining monitoring alerts on network throughput. Unfortunately, you will only find very vague information about the ...

Evolution of the EC2 Network Performance: m3, m4, and m5

AWS announces new generations of EC2 instances from time to time. Typically, each generation offers better performance at lower costs. This article discusses the networking capabilities of the general purpose instances over time. Spoiler alert: you can ...

EC2 network performance demystified: m3 and m4

AWS offers EC2 instances in different sizes, defined by the instance type. How do you decide which instance type to use? Do you need an m4.large or m4.xlarge instance? At least the following factors should affect your decision: How much memory does the...

AWS Velocity Series: EC2 based app CI/CD pipeline

In the previous article, you learned how to use CloudFormation to describe a production-ready infrastructure for an EC2 based app. In this article you will learn to: Automate the creation of an AMI that contains the app with Packer Deploy a CloudFormat...

AWS Velocity Series: EC2 based app infrastructure

To run a production-ready application on EC2 gives you maximum freedom but also maximum responsibilities. By production-ready, I mean: Highly available: no single point of failure Scalable: increase or decrease the number of instances based on load Fri...

AWS Velocity Series: Running your application

There are many options when it comes to running an application on AWS. EC2 based, containerized, or serverless. Choosing the best option for your specific use case is important. All options that I present are what I call production-ready: Highly availa...

WordPress on AWS: smooth and pain free

I’m not a fan of WordPress, as it is neither cloud-ready nor serverless. That’s why this blog runs on CloudFront and S3 and is built by Hexo. But 25% of all websites are proudly published with WordPress. You will learn about the easiest way to run WordP...

Manage AWS EC2 SSH access with IAM

AWS can deploy one EC2 Key Pair to your EC2 instance. But this approach has several disadvantages: You can only use one key per EC2 instance. But you shouldn’t share keys between users. Access to EC2 instances via SSH can not be restricted to specific ...