I’ve been teaching AWS courses for more than five years now - teaching is Curious Orbit’s origin story. It was the vehicle
I used to start the consulting and managed services part of the business.
I still do a ton of training and love it. I say to anyone who will listen that we’re better consultants because we teach
and better teachers because we are consultants.
Although the technology (and courseware) has changed dramatically over the last five years, there’s one constant - no,
it’s not baseball - it’s agility. In every course, at least one slide talks about how organizations can improve their ability
to adapt to changing market conditions and stay competitive by adopting AWS.
NOTE: This article originally appeared on LinkedIn.
By now, I’m sure most of you have seen the recent [article on TechCrunch related to public EBS snapshots.] (https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/09/aws-ebs-cloud-backups-leak/) If you haven’t let me sum it up for you - like S3 if you do silly things, your data may end up in the wrong hands.
In the article, the security researcher - Ben Morris - estimates that there “…could be as many as 1,250 exposures across all Amazon cloud regions.”
Yes, you have responsibilities. Just because you’re using someones else’s computer doesn’t mean you get to ignore all the boring stuff and hope that someone else takes care of it for you.
The AWS Well Architected Framework (WAF) is a series of documents maintained by the subject matter experts at Amazon Web Services.
The goal of the Well Architected Framework is to provide you with guidance on how to build more flexible, resilient, secure, cost-effective solutions on the platform.
Currently, there are five ‘pillar’s, three ’lens,’ and an overview document.
If you’re running solutions on the AWS platform, you most likely have a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). The majority of deployed VPCs don’t have an essential feature enabled - VPC Flow Logs.
VPC Flow logs provide insight into the traffic flowing in (and out) of your VPC. You can enable logging for an entire VPC, subnets or network interfaces within a VPC. During the setup process, you can decide what you want to record - Rejected, Accepted, or All traffic.
A few weeks back, my nephew spent a few days with us to finish his March break. Like many gamers, he spends most of his time in Fortnite, but when he arrived, he reminded me about our AWS Minecraft server from the previous year.
His memory is (much) better than mine, so I had to go digging - but I found the Amazon Machine Image (AMI) we created when we mothballed the Minecraft adventure from the year before. We decided to bring it back to life so we could play and I showed him how to run the AWS CLI commands to do it … yes, this happens when you spend March Break with me.
Originally posted to ORBIT - our weekly newsletter - back in December. Want content earlier? Sign up now!
As we get closer to the end of the year I’ve been spending time looking at the work we’ve done for customers and the most common questions we’ve received from students in our AWS training sessions. This week I decided to create a list of ‘Resolutions’ for 2019 when it comes to deploying (and/or supporting) solutions on the AWS platform.
If memory serves me correctly, the upcoming Re: Invent conference in Las Vegas will be my fourth. Every year it gets bigger, and I figured it was about time that I wrote about what I’ve learned about how best to survive Re: Invent.
Tip #1: Stay in one spot each day
Last year was the first time the conference was spread across many hotels on the Vegas strip. Because everything was so spread out, AWS provided shuttle services between the venues so that people could get to their sessions.
Here are three of the simplest - often overlooked - ways to quickly improve the security of your AWS account.
Enable a Password Policy
I’m always amazed when we [audit an AWS account] (https://curiousorbit.com/service/aws-audit/), how many folks don’t have a password policy enabled in their AWS account. We would never do this on-premise, but for some reason, it happens all the time on AWS. Enabling a password policy takes all of two minutes and ensure that your users have high-quality passwords.
In case you missed it, back in July AWS announced a new feature for EBS snapshots called Data Lifecycle Management (DLM). DLM removes much of the heavy lifting associated with ensuring your EBS volumes are properly backed up - also known as ‘snapshotting.’ All you need to do is create an IAM role; DLM will do this for you, but you could also use CloudFormation, tag your EBS volumes and then create one or more policies.
Last week I taught an Architecting on AWS course. During the course, we spend a fair amount of time talking about Compute (Elastic Compute Cloud) and Storage (Elastic Block Storage), which always leads to some great discussion around how to get started.
A few weeks back, I wrote about how we help organizations find talent with the attributes we feel make excellent members of an [AWS team] ( https://curiousorbit.com/blog/building-an-effective-aws-team/ ). This week, I’d like to build on the topic and describe to you how we help organizations construct a CCoE.
Think of the Cloud Center of Excellence as a hub of a wheel; it’s the team within the organization which sets the overall direction and empowers other groups within the company to move as fast as
they can within a set of guardrails built and maintained by the members of the CCoE.
If I had to weigh the difficulty of the AWS platform versus finding the right technical resources, by far the search for the best resources for your team is the most challenging aspect of building solutions on the AWS platform.
Over the last year and a bit, we’ve helped dozens of organizations build their internal teams. In this article, I’ll outline some of the most important things we look for when scouting for AWS resources.
A significant selling point for AWS is the ability to go global in minutes. To better understand what that means, this article is going to break down Amazon’s existing global infrastructure for AWS. To start, let’s look at the world; on any globe, we group countries into continents, and that is where the AWS footprint starts: Regions. Each Region is a physical location in the world comprised multiple Availability Zones.
Whenever I describe AWS services to organizations just starting on their AWS journey, I like to take an approach I use when learning new things myself: relate new concepts to material of which I’m already intimately knowledgeable.
One of the core components almost every AWS service relies on is the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). I like to visualize a VPC as a network switch inside a large office building; every piece of your network infrastructure must connect to the switch to communicate with one another. The same theory applies to your AWS environment; all resources must be in the same VPC to easily communicate with each other. Although you do have the ability to peer separate VPC’s together to allow communication between them - we’ll come back to this.
Let me tell you how the journey to Amazon Web Services starts for most customers - with an impossible deadline.
One of your colleagues stops by your desk on Friday and says they need the new system up and ready to go by Tuesday - fun times.
The team decides that now is the perfect time to try out AWS and since everyone has been wanted to give it a try anyways they all enthusiastically jump in to get the job done. Then something
amazing happens - not only does the team deliver the request on time but finishes early! The customer is so impressed with the turnaround they tell others about how great the experience was.
Your first month in AWS can be a bit overwhelming. With over ninety services it can be difficult to make sure you’ve set up your AWS account following best practices. In this webinar, I’ll provide you with an actionable list of tasks when first getting started with AWS.
A few weeks back now I attended my first hackathon. For those of you who aren’t exactly sure what a hackathon is here’s my definition. A hackathon is where a group of individuals get together for a day (or more), come up with a few ideas of things they would like to build, pick one idea, and then get down to the business of creating something.
At the hackathon I attended, we decided to create what we ended up calling the ‘Nerd Party Alert’ application. We ended up landing on the idea because one of the attendees decided to bring along a project he had already been working on for a while. He was hacking together a Raspberry Pi with a camera and a screen.
I mentioned in an early post that I’ve been traveling quite a bit this summer leading AWS boot camps. Even though I’m not really into flying, It’s been a ton of fun, and I’ve had the pleasure of meeting some fantastic people along the way.
For the majority of the day, students are using the AWS Management Console to build a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), deploy security groups and configure auto-scaling groups – just to mention a few things. It equates to quite a bit of clicking and troubleshooting along the way. Throughout the day I talk about “Infrastructure as Code” and how we can automate all the deployment we do throughout the boot camp via an AWS service called Cloud Formation. The last thing we build is a MySQL instance using the Relational Database Service (RDS), and I purposefully use Cloud Formation to deploy the Multi-AZ infrastructure.
I hear people refer to their infrastructure in AWS as being part of their ‘cloud datacenter’ on a regular basis. Each and every time, I cringe.
Here’s why.
When we use a term like ‘cloud datacenter’ it reinforces the idea of a physical space where we rack and stack long-living computing, storage, and network gear that we own.
Rather than just replicating our current infrastructure, in the cloud, we should be figuring how to refactor our applications to take advantage a highly flexible platform. Our goal should be to build loosely coupled scalable architectures to support our applications.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of running several AWS boot camps for customers in Mississauga, Dallas, and Chicago. Spending the day showing customers how they can get started on the AWS platform is one of my favourite aspects of my job - outside of getting to use some impressive technology every day. When I think back to when I got started with AWS, I’m amazed at just how different the conversations I have today are compared to just a few months ago.
Sep 6, 2016
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