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Our favorite blog posts handpicked for you.

End-user monitoring of your website with CloudWatch Synthetics

There are countless reasons why your website is not working as your users expect. From a technical point of view, you can monitor your load balancers, your web servers, and your database. But what if that external script that you embed is breaking your ...

Terraform, can you keep a secret?

Did you know that Terraform state can - and most likely does - contain sensitive data? A few examples of sensitive information stored in the Terraform state: Initial password for an RDS instance. Unencrypted value fetched from SSM parameter (SecureStri...

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 ...

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 ...

What's the best AWS Compute option for your project?

There are many good reasons why you should move to the cloud and AWS in particular. Benefit from the latest innovations or consume sophisticated technology as a commodity (relational databases, Hadoop clusters, data warehouses, …) to lower your time to ...

GitHub Actions vs. AWS CodePipeline

Deployment pipelines first! When launching a new project, start with building a deployment pipeline. Automating the process from changing the source code to shipping your application to the production environment is a success factor. But how to build a ...

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...

10 Success Factors for Starting Your Cloud Journey

Are you planning to start the cloud journey for your organization soon? Learn from others to turn your initiative into a huge success. Michael and I have accompanied medium-sized businesses and enterprises in their transformation projects and would like...

AWS Cost Optimization 101

The beginning of the year is the perfect time to clean up and optimize. This also applies to your AWS bill. I’ve composed practical tips on how to cut costs with small effort. The good thing about AWS: you typically pay per usage. The bad thing about A...

Checklist: Is your application ready for a container cluster?

Is your application ready to run on a container cluster? Use this checklist to find out whether you are good to deploy your application on Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and AWS Fargate or any other container cluster solution. Does your applica...

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...

Resilient task scheduling with ECS Fargate

Many applications use scheduled jobs to automate recurring tasks, such as: Generating and sending a monthly report. Disabling users who haven’t logged in for more than 365 days. Deleting stale data from the database. Doing so is simple, as long as an...