Easily reduce by 70% your AWS Fargate bills

Quick post today about cost saving on AWS. As you know, two of my preferred subjects on Public Cloud are Security and FinOps! Recently, AWS introduced a way to reduce AWS bills by up to 70% using Spot instances with the AWS Fargate service. It’s really easy to use. If your workload is interruption-proof, batch jobs, or CI/CD containers, don’t hesitate to use it to drastically reduce your workload costs. Using Terraform, you just have to specify capacity_providers and/or default_capacity_provider_strategy on your aws_ecs_cluster resource. ...

February 16, 2020 · 1 min · 127 words · zoph

qTweet - SQS to Twitter Speaker

qTweet is a dead simple AWS SQS to Twitter serverless speaker :speaker:. Publish message :love_letter: to SQS (FIFO), Lambda function will handle publishing it to Twitter. Automagically. :tada: To be honest, my plan is to automate the tweet of certain information using this queue in multiple side projects. As usual, I’m sharing this with you folks as I was not able to find an equivalent in GitHub / Open source projects. I hope it could be useful to someone else. ...

February 5, 2020 · 2 min · 412 words · zoph

CloudWatch Synthetics - Canary testing

Canary What? In software testing, a canary (also called a canary test) is a push of programming code changes to a small number of end-users who have not volunteered to test anything. The goal of a canary test is to make sure code changes are transparent and work in a real-world environment. Canary tests, which are often automated, are run after testing in a sandbox environment has been completed. Because the canary is only pushed to a small number of users, its impact is relatively small should the new code prove to be buggy and changes can be reversed quickly. ...

February 2, 2020 · 4 min · 671 words · zoph

On being Independent

In December 2019, I’ve decided to switch from a long-time (15 years) habit of Full-Time Employee (FTE) contracts to running my own business as an Independent AWS Cloud Architect. This decision came to me after a few disappointments from my past experiences as a traditional employee/consultant, and I had been thinking about this switch for several years. It was the perfect time for me to start this new challenge: I’ve no plan to take a homebuyer’s loan for the next few years. I’m confident regarding my AWS skills now, even if I still have a lot to learn. My network is now large enough to easily get new opportunities (friends, ex-colleagues, acquaintances, social network). My wife is working and has an FTE job. I will focus on value delivery to my customers as a freelance consultant, in the following areas: Modern Cloud Architecture Design, Security Assessments, Reliability, Automation, Cost-Effectiveness, Training and so on. ...

January 1, 2020 · 2 min · 317 words · zoph

AWS Security Toolbox (AST)

In my day-to-day job, I was wasting time reinstalling and dealing with the dependencies of all my favorite tools for AWS Security Audits and Assessments. So, lately, I’ve decided to start another pet project trying to solve this issue and provide a simple Docker container with all the security-related tooling for your AWS Assessments. I’ve decided to open-source it. After some discussion with my peers, they were interested in this kind of stuff to avoid wasting hours installing a myriad of apps and Python dependencies on their own laptop or customer machine. ...

December 16, 2019 · 1 min · 143 words · zoph