This post was updated in July 2020. It was originally my first post on this blog in December 2016. 👴 I’m often asked by many colleagues, friends, or Twitter followers where to start with Amazon Web Services (AWS). In this post, I will try to explain where you should start in 2020. I’ll try to write this post as I wish I had when I got into this technology in 2016. ...
This article was originally posted in September 2019. Updated in February 2020. Disclaimer Thanks to @0xdabbad00 from SummitRoute for the original idea and jq parsing. Purpose When your production workloads rely on AWS IAM Managed Policies (don’t do this), you will need to be notified when changes occur behind the scenes. It’s also interesting to monitor new AWS service releases ahead of the announcements to get spoiled. This pet project automates the retrieval (every 4 hours) of new AWS Managed IAM Policies to make it easier to monitor and get alerted when changes occur (by AWS), using the “Watch” feature on GitHub, RSS or a dedicated Twitter Account. ...
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. ...
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. ...
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. ...