tecRacer Amazon AWS Blog

AWS Tools

Wed, 26 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

EC2-Tools AMI Baking Tools that help build the AMIs for your bespoke EC2 instances. AWS EC2 Image Builder - native service to build and test AMIs in AWS. AWS System Manager Automation Netflix Aminator (OpenSource) Packer (OpenSource) State Control EC2-Server Tools and services that help you reduce your EC2 costs. ParkMyCloud (SaaS) tecRacer is a reseller of this product CloudTiming (SaaS) Flywheel (OpenSource) Skeddly (SaaS) Amazon-Windows-Drivers & Tools Download-Link of the Windows EC2Config Services Download-Link of the Windows CloudFormation Clients Download-Link of the Windows Citrix XEN-Drivers AWS Directory Services Port-Tester VM Conversion to AWS CloudEndure Migration AWS Server Migration Service Racemi.

Building Type-Safe Serverless Applications with Prisma, Lambda, and Private RDS

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Running Prisma ORM in AWS Lambda with RDS in a private VPC is a good pattern for building type-safe serverless applications. However, documentation on this setup is sparse, and developers typically encounter two critical challenges that aren’t immediately obvious: correctly bundling Prisma’s binary dependencies for Lambda’s environment and automating database migrations through CDK without external CI/CD orchestration.

Working with AWS European Sovereign Cloud (ESC): Terraform, IaC, and what's different

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you manage AWS infrastructure with code, the European Sovereign Cloud adds a new partition to think about. Different endpoints, separate IAM, its own console. This guide covers what works out of the box, what needs changes, and the patterns that help when you deploy across both ESC and commercial AWS.

AWS European Sovereign Cloud (ESC) – Launch, Pricing, and What’s Next

Thu, 15 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The AWS European Sovereign Cloud (ESC) has officially launched, promising full digital sovereignty for European workloads. But beyond the headlines, important questions remain: How does pricing compare to established AWS regions? Which services are really available today—and how complete are they? In this post, we share early hands-on insights from the ESC pricing calculator, highlight practical limitations around AI, CI/CD, and platform services, and give an honest first assessment of what architects and decision-makers should expect when evaluating AWS’s new sovereign cloud.

How tecRacer achieved 100% Chat Intent Resolution with HelloFresh Chat Bot

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I want to know what my customer wants! And I want to automate it. I tried “classical” NLU and “modern” LLM - but we do not understand 100% of the queries. How to achieve that? Well, there is a third twin. Let’s have a look how we achieved 100% correctness with the HelloFresh chatbot intent resolution.

Brandnew Connect AI Agents with CloudFormation generated prompt is in need of detective work

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Amazon Connect has some really cool AI features. One of them is the Agent Assist, which allows agents to quickly access relevant information and insights during customer interactions. To adapt the behaviour to your own needs, you can do some prompt engineering and use your own prompts. And of course we use IAC - infrastructure as code, that means CloudFormation. BUT as the features are so new, the error messages are much to short. So let`s do some detective work. And automation…

My Mailbox bucket: Building an IMAP Server for Amazon SES Mailmanager

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Mailbox challenge:

Amazon SES, the simple Email Service, has no mailboxes. What if you want to use it as a mail server and just have a mailbox? Just Build an IMAP Server - Here’s How.

MCP Authentication for Agent Connections in Amazon Bedrock AgentCore

Wed, 29 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

MCP Authentication for Agent Connections in Amazon Bedrock AgentCore: A Complete Guide Agents are currently the go-to topic in AI, with AWS heavily pushing Amazon Bedrock AgentCore as the next-generation platform for building intelligent, tool-enabled applications. However, while LLMs excel at language understanding and generation, they have fundamental limitations in performing complex calculations, data processing, and accessing external systems. While an LLM might have learned that 2+2 equals 4, it cannot perform integral calculations or access real-time data from external APIs.

The cure? - Is Automated Reasoning the solution to treat hallucination?

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

AWS released GA Automated Reasoning checks for Bedrock. What sounds so small could be the actual drug against AI hallucinations. But it turns out: It is complicated! Let me show you, what I mean.

Vibe drawing with Q-Developer Cloud Diagrams - fast, flexible, fine

Sat, 05 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The AWS website project is launched! But, as usual, we forgot something – good documentation. How do you create good diagrams for documentation when the schedule is tight? For this task, an LLM that can alter local files, together with a text-based diagram tool, really gives great results. Let me show you.

The architecture chameleon - Lambda or Container with same code

Thu, 05 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

At the beginning of a AWS software development project, some big architectural decisions need to be made. This is a classic: does AWS Lambda or Docker/Microservice make more sense?

Well - with the GOpher Chameleon, you can have both worlds. The very same code for Lambda or container.

SQL Server 2019 Failover Cluster on EC2 – Lessons Learned

Tue, 25 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Customer requirements demanded the setup of a SQL Failover Cluster on EC2. Following AWS’s reference setup, I encountered some issues that cost me a couple of hours. In this blog post, I’ll share my experience and the solutions I found, hopefully saving you valuable time and making your journey to set up a SQL 2019 Failover Cluster with Windows Server 2019 on EC2 smoother and more enjoyable.

Which AWS Regions are Lambda@Edge functions executed in?

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Lambda@Edge functions are executed in multiple regions around the world, but which ones exactly? In this post we’ll find out together, which will enable us to pre-create log groups and other resources for them.

Speed up your Multi-Channel GenAI Solution - Tips from real projects

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Your agentic multi-channel, multi-modal GenAI solution idea may be buzz-word-compatible. But to do some expectation management: It will not run as fast as this dog. So, we share some of the tips from our projects on how to speed up your GenAI solution.

Integrating HubSpot with AWS Lambda

Fri, 06 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Like many organizations, tecRacer uses HubSpot as a CRM. Integrating Hubspot with other (internal) systems enables smooth workflows for everyone involved. Since I recently built a custom integration, I thought it may be helpful to explain how to set up a secure interface with AWS.

From EC2 to C6 - Clear Compliance Chaos with clear Customer Collaboration with MSSP

Wed, 20 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

To battle security compliance is a challenge, which is besten solved as a team sport. We show you some solutions to win this tug of war, like knowing not only the technical, but also the psychological aspects of the game.

This is the way our MSSP works together with you.

Choosing solutions for container security on AWS.

Sun, 03 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Even the best security measures can’t prevent all security incidents. With the right tools, you can detect and respond to incidents quickly. The problem is not anymore that you have no tools at hand but that you have too many. How do you choose the right one?

How I spent a few hours using advanced technology to save $2

Fri, 01 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Opportunity cost is an important economic concept, but sometimes we need to ignore it to learn something. Join me in using a variety of services and tools to figure out what is using my KMS keys and if I can safely delete them.

Embedded Embeddings Database: Building a low cost serverless RAG solution

Wed, 23 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) solutions are an impressive way to talk to one’s data. One of the challenges of RAG solutions is the associated cost, often driven by the vector database. In a previous blog article I presented how to tackle this issue by using Athena with Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) as a knowledge database. One the of the main limitations with Athena is the latency and the low number of concurrent queries. In this new blog article, I present a new low-cost serverless solution that makes use of an embedded vector database, SQLite, to achieve a low cost while maintaining high concurrency.

Advanced API Gateway Throttling: Time-Based Adjustments, Budget Alerts, and WAF Configured with Terraform

Fri, 11 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In the previous post, “API Gateway and Lambda Throttling with Terraform”, we covered the basics of setting up throttling for your API Gateway and Lambda functions. In this follow-up, we’ll take it to the next level, adding budget controls, time-based throttling adjustments, and AWS WAF security integration to safeguard your API while optimizing both performance and cost-efficiency.

API Gateway and Lambda Throttling with Terraform: A Comprehensive Guide

Thu, 10 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In today’s cloud-native world, effectively managing API and serverless function performance is crucial for building reliable and cost-effective applications. This guide explores advanced throttling techniques for AWS API Gateway and Lambda using Terraform, incorporating best practices from the AWS Well-Architected Framework and real-world implementation patterns.

Comprehensive Guide to AWS AI/ML Services: The Ultimate Decision Maker’s Playbook

Fri, 04 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Looking to integrate artificial intelligence and machine learning into your business strategy? AWS has an ever-growing suite of AI/ML services, which can sometimes feel overwhelming to navigate. But don’t worry—this playbook is designed to provide a clear, simple guide to help you find the right tools for your business. Explore how AWS AI/ML services can empower your business and simplify your processes—no expert knowledge needed!

Performance Boost: 10 Expert Tips for Optimizing Your Amazon OpenSearch Service Cluster (2024 Update)

Tue, 01 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Note: This is an updated version of this blog.

By implementing these recommendations, you can maximize the potential of your Amazon OpenSearch Service domain, delivering an improved search experience while optimizing costs and maintaining security. Let’s explore these expert tips to supercharge your OpenSearch cluster.

Why and How to Migrate from Solr to Amazon OpenSearch Service in 2024

Sat, 28 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This guide is for organizations currently using Solr and considering a migration to Amazon OpenSearch Service. We will explore the benefits of migrating, the process, and the key challenges, offering insights from real-world migrations to help you make an informed decision.

Regaining Amazon QuickSight SPICE capacity

Fri, 27 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

When using Business Intelligence solutions, it can quickly become difficult to manage all the resources created by numerous users. In this blog article, we will see how the Amazon QuickSight API was leveraged to determine which resources used up all the available SPICE capacity in our Amazon QuickSight account.

OpenSearch vs. Elasticsearch: Why OpenSearch is the Better Choice for AWS Users in 2024

Wed, 25 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In the dynamic landscape of search and analytics engines, AWS users often find themselves weighing the merits of OpenSearch against Elasticsearch. While both platforms offer robust search capabilities, Amazon OpenSearch Service emerges as the superior option for those operating within the AWS ecosystem. This comprehensive analysis delves into the reasons why OpenSearch stands out and how it compares to Elasticsearch, particularly for AWS users.

Building Data Aggregation Pipelines using Apache Airflow and Athena

Mon, 23 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Business insights are frequently generated from aggregated data, like daily sales per market segment over time. In this blog post we’ll use Apache Airflow to build a data aggregation pipeline that utilizes Amazon Athena for the heavy lifting. We’ll cover best practices that you should follow to build a production-ready system.

Amazon OpenSearch Backup and Restore: Strategies and Considerations

Fri, 20 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Amazon OpenSearch is a powerful, scalable search and analytics service offered by AWS. As organizations increasingly rely on OpenSearch for critical data operations, implementing robust backup and restore strategies becomes paramount. This article provides a comprehensive guide to OpenSearch backup and restore, helping AWS practitioners make informed decisions about data protection and disaster recovery.

Who-Is-RAG?

Tue, 17 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve used a gamified approach to showcase how Retrieval Augmented Generation enables businesses to use Large Language Models in combination with their company data. Based on the popular board game Who-Is-It?, we created a demo.

Building a Cloud SIEM with AWS OpenSearch Security Analytics

Mon, 16 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In this blog post, I’ll show you how to build a lightweight SIEM system in AWS using AWS OpenSearch and its Security Analytics features, combined with Zeek. This solution enables real-time monitoring of cloud network traffic and generates alerts when potential threats are detected.

How to accidentally create read-only DynamoDB items

Sat, 14 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In a recent Developing on AWS course I was faced with an interesting question about DynamoDB. What happens if you create an item that features attributes of a global secondary index with a data type that doesn’t match the index? My intuition was wrong, let’s check out what actually happens.

Enhancing CloudFront Security with Response Headers

Fri, 30 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Response headers play a vital role in reinforcing security measures, protecting against various attacks, and enhancing the overall security of your web applications. In this blog post, we’ll explore how to implement a CloudFront response header policy to improve security, walk through the process of testing and refining your settings, and discuss how to automate these changes across your infrastructure.

Making the TPC-H dataset available in Athena using Airflow

Thu, 29 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The TPC-H dataset is commonly used to benchmark data warehouses or, more generally, decision support systems. It describes a typical e-commerce workload and includes benchmark queries to enable performance comparison between different data warehouses. I think the dataset is also useful to teach building different kinds of ETL or analytics workflows, so I decided to explore ways of making it available in Amazon Athena.

Mastering URL Redirections with AWS CloudFront Functions

Thu, 29 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Struggling with URL redirections for your AWS-hosted website? If you’re using an S3 bucket as your origin, you might have noticed that S3 alone doesn’t support dynamic redirects via server-side rules. That’s where AWS CloudFront Functions come in—offering a fast, simple, and cost-effective way to manage redirections. In this guide, we’ll show you how CloudFront can handle your URL redirections without requiring separate S3 buckets or CloudFront distributions, streamlining your architecture and improving your website’s SEO and user experience.

Enabling Apache Airflow to copy large S3 objects

Tue, 27 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re trying to use Apache Airflow to copy large objects in S3, you might have encountered issues where S3 complains about you sending an InvalidRequest. We will fix that in this post by writing a custom operator to handle the underlying problem.

We like to move it move it - Serverless Lambda transport between development stages

Sun, 25 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

You want to ship the very same code you have tested from test stage to production stage. But most of the time a CICD pipeline re-creates the code to deploy to production. So you do not deploy the tested code! With the AWS Lambda transport tool you can move the very same code you have tested to production or between stages in different accounts.

You can't Opt-Out of Performance Tracking in the AWS Console

Thu, 22 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Even though I had opted out of performance measurement cookies, I noticed a lot of web requests that look like performance measurement in the AWS console. In this article I investigate what’s being sent and what we can do about it.

Improving Accessibility by Generating Image-alt texts using GenAI

Wed, 21 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In this article, we’ll be using GenAI to generate alternative texts for images in Markdown documents, which will help people relying on screen readers to access your content.

Building a low cost serverless Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) solution

Fri, 09 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Large language models (LLMs) can generate complex text and solve numerous tasks such as question-answering, information extraction, and text summarization. However, they may suffer from issues such as information gaps or hallucinations. In this blog article, we will explore how to mitigate these issues using Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and build a low-cost solution in the process.

AWS Cost Management Made Easy: Build Your Own Calculator with the AWS Pricing API

Tue, 06 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

When discussing AWS pricing with customers, limitations in the official AWS Pricing Calculator can sometimes hinder accurate cost estimations. This blog post addresses a specific challenge encountered with AWS CloudWatch Synthetics pricing and provides a solution by building a custom calculator using the AWS Pricing API.

Decoupling Search Logic in Application Development with OpenSearch Templates and Aliases

Fri, 02 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Imagine you’re managing an e-commerce platform with millions of products. Your search functionality is tightly coupled with your application code, making it challenging to update search logic without redeploying the entire application. This scenario illustrates the critical need for decoupling search logic in modern application development. This blog post explores how OpenSearch templates and aliases can address this challenge, offering practical strategies to enhance search performance and simplify maintenance.

Creating an Alarm to Detect Usage of a Pending Deletion KMS Keys and AWS Secrets

Fri, 26 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In cloud computing, security is a critical concern. While AWS provides backup solutions for many resources, custom configurations often require additional protection. Two key services, AWS Key Management Service (KMS) and AWS Secrets Manager, don’t offer direct backup options. However, they implement a deletion grace period— by default 30 days and this is the maximum — allowing for potential restoration.

Creating Recommended Alarms for Amazon OpenSearch Service with Terraform

Mon, 15 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Amazon OpenSearch Service is a powerful tool for search, log analytics, and RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) systems. To ensure optimal performance and reliability, effective monitoring is crucial.

Changing of the Guards - GenAI pattern to Bedrock service

Fri, 12 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

10th of Juli: The ten new features, which were announced in AWS NY Summmit, show a trend in Amazon Bedrock: to implement Prompt Engineering Patterns as services. One of the best practices to avoid prompt injection attacks is GuardRails. Here, I do a deep dive into the new GuardRails features “contextual grounding filter” and “independent API to call your guardrails.” Note: Guardrails work ONLY with English currently.

Going on an Industry Quest: Manufacturing and Auto

Fri, 28 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Using Industry Quest: Manufacturing and Auto you can learn about building IoT and factory management solutions in AWS. It’s a game that teaches you about real time monitoring, predictive maintenance, machine learning and data analytics. This blog gives an introduction to the game and covers my thoughts about its usefulness.

An unsung hero of Amazon SageMaker: Local Mode

Tue, 18 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Amazon SageMaker offers a highly customizable platform for machine learning at scale. Job execution within Amazon SageMaker can take some time to set up, which can be inconvenient or even time consuming during development and debugging phases. Running training and processing jobs locally can greatly increase the speed of development and debugging before running them at scale on AWS.

Build a scalable IDS and IPS solution using Suricata and AWS Gateway Load Balancer

Tue, 21 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In this blog post, I will demonstrate how to leverage Suricata with the AWS Gateway Load Balancer and Terraform to implement a highly available, scalable, and cost-effective IDS/IPS solution in AWS. This approach will enable you to monitor network traffic, detect threats, and block them before they reach your systems.

Switching Identity Providers in the IAM Identity Center

Thu, 16 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Switching the Identity Provider in the IAM Identity Center while keeping all permissions intact and minimizing disruptions can be a daunting task. In this post I’m explaining how we solved this for one of our customers.

How to migrate data from Amazon EFS to Amazon S3 with AWS DataSync

Tue, 07 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

AWS DataSync is a service that simplifies and accelerates data migrations not only to but also from and between AWS storage services. In this blog post we will see how to leverage it to migrate data from an EFS file system to an Amazon S3 bucket.

Automating Cross-Account / Cross-Region Backups with AWS Backup in AWS Organizations

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In this blog post we’ll dive deep into AWS Backup. We cover how the service works, how to set it up and focus on how it interacts with different AWS resources. It’s crucial to understand which features are supported for different services such as EBS or S3 to understand how to protect your environment. Additionally we look into Cross-Region and Cross-Account backup and restore options in the context of an AWS Organization.

Introduction to SSO with the IAM Identity Center and Entra ID

Tue, 23 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

IAM Identity Center, formerly AWS SSO, is often used as an access management solution in front of one or more AWS accounts. More often than not, its purpose is to grant access to AWS accounts within an AWS organization. Today we’ll shed some light on the basic concepts and explain how this solution can be integrated with Azure AD which has recently been renamed to Entra ID to provide Single-Sign-On to your AWS environment.

Using undocumented AWS APIs with Python

Fri, 19 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

It’s probably not a surprise that (almost) everything Amazon Web Services offers is accessible through web services. AWS also provides a range of SDKs that make interfacing with and integrating them in your code base relatively painless. These SDKs are sometimes a bit limited, though. There are certain things that you can only do through the AWS console, meaning that there are still services under the surface, but they’re undocumented and not accessible through the official SDKs. That API call is what we refer to as an undocumented API. In this post, I’m going to show you how to discover these APIs and use them in your scripts.

Adding Cognito Authentication to our Serverless Dash App

Fri, 12 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In the most recent installment of the Serverless Dash series, we’ll look at implementing proper authentication using Cognito. This post covers setting up the user pool, the app client and also the logout option.

Hyperparameter Tuning with Ray 2.x and AWS Sagemaker

Wed, 03 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Finding the right set of hyperparameters when training machine learning models is a resource-consuming and costly task. In this post, we try to simplify this by exploring hyperparameter tuning for reinforcement learning models with Ray 2.x on AWS Sagemaker.

RAG AI-LLM Databases on AWS: do not pay for oversized, go Serverless instead

Wed, 03 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The RAG - Retrieval Augmented Generation is an approach to reduce hallucination using LLMs (Large Language Models). With RAG you need a storage solution, which is a vector-store in most cases.

When you have the task to build the infrastructure for such a use case, you have to decide which database to use. Sometimes, the best solution is not the biggest one. Then you should go serverless to a smaller solution, which fits the use-case better. In this post, I introduce some of the solutions and aid you in deciding which one to choose.

Build a Serverless S3 Explorer with Dash

Tue, 02 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Many projects get to the point where your sophisticated infrastructure delivers reports to S3 and now you need a way for your end users to get them. Giving everyone access to the AWS account usually doesn’t work. In this post we’ll look at an alternative - we’re going to build a Serverless S3 Explorer with Dash, Lambda and the API Gateway.

Automated ECS deployments using AWS CodePipeline

Wed, 27 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

When developing applications, particularly in the realm of containerization, CI/CD workflows and pipelines play an important role in ensuring automated testing, security scanning, and seamless deployment. Leveraging a pipeline-based approach enables fast and secure shipping of new features by adhering to a standardized set of procedures and principles. Using the AWS cloud’s flexibility amplifies this process, facilitating even faster development cycles and dependable software delivery.

In this blog post, I aim to demonstrate how you can leverage AWS CodePipeline and Amazon ECS alongside Terraform to implement an automated CI/CD pipeline. This pipeline efficiently handles the building, testing, and deployment of containerized applications, streamlining your development and delivery processes.

Adding Basic Authentication to the Serverless Dash App

Wed, 20 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’ll teach you how to add interactive basic auth to the Serverless Dash app that we deployed recently.

Building Lambda with Terraform

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Note: This is an updated version of this blog. Building Lambda Functions with Terraform Introduction Many of us use Terraform to manage our infrastructure as code. As AWS users, Lambda functions tend to be an important part of our infrastructure and its automation. Deploying - and especially building - Lambda functions with Terraform unfortunately isn’t as straightforward as I’d like. (To be fair: it’s very much debatable whether you should use Terraform for this purpose, but I’d like to do that - and if I didn’t, you wouldn’t get to read this article, so let’s continue)

Find It Fast: Streamline Phone Number Searches with OpenSearch.

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This guide empowers you to optimize OpenSearch for lightning-fast and accurate phone number searches. Frustration-free experiences are key for your customers, and by leveraging edge ngrams and custom analyzers, you can empower OpenSearch to efficiently handle even large datasets.

Deploying a Serverless Dash App with AWS SAM and Lambda

Mon, 04 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Today I’m going to show you how to deploy a Dash app in a Lambda Function behind an API Gateway. This setup is truly serverless and allows you to only pay for infrastructure when there is traffic, which is an ideal deployment model for small (internal) applications. Dash is a Python framework that enables you to build interactive frontend applications without writing a single line of Javascript. Internally and in projects we like to use it in order to build a quick proof of concept for data driven applications because of the nice integration with Plotly and pandas.

Reinforcement learning with Ray 2.x on Amazon SageMaker

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A few years ago Amazon SageMaker introduced direct support for reinforcement learning (RL) through integration of RL-frameworks, including Ray. However, support has not been kept up to date and the supported versions are no longer what you might call current.

From fragile to formidable: How to detect, fix and prevent container vulnerabilities with Inspector and Docker Scout

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A webserver running on a container. Sound simple. Let`s dive deeper into how your architecture choices affect application security. I use docker scout for the container and show how Amazon Inspector can serve as a general-purpose security tool.

Understanding Iterations in Ray RLlib

Fri, 16 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I’ve been engaged in my first reinforcement learning project using Ray’s RLlib and Sagemaker. I had dabbled in machine learning before, but one of the nice things about this project is that it allows me to dive deep into something unfamiliar. Naturally, that results in some mistakes being made. Today I want to share a bit about my experience in trying to improve the iteration time for the IMPALA algorithm in Ray’s RLlib.

GO-ing to production with Bedrock RAG Part 2: Develop, Deploy and Test the RAG Backend with SAM&Postman

Thu, 11 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In part one, we took the journey from a POC monolith to a scaleable two-tier architecture. The focus is on the DevOps KPI deployment time and the testability. With the right tools - AWS SAM and Postman - the dirty work becomes a nice walk in the garden again. See what a KEBEG stack can achieve!

Streamlined Kafka Schema Evolution in AWS using MSK and the Glue Schema Registry

Sat, 23 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In today’s data-driven world, effective data management is crucial for organizations aiming to make well-informed, data-driven decisions. As the importance of data continues to grow, so does the significance of robust data management practices. This includes the processes of ingesting, storing, organizing, and maintaining the data generated and collected by an organization.

Within the realm of data management, schema evolution stands out as one of the most critical aspects. Businesses evolve over time, leading to changes in data and, consequently, changes in corresponding schemas. Even though a schema may be initially defined for your data, evolving business requirements inevitably demand schema modifications.

Yet, modifying data structures is no straightforward task, especially when dealing with distributed systems and teams. It’s essential that downstream consumers of the data can seamlessly adapt to new schemas. Coordinating these changes becomes a critical challenge to minimize downtime and prevent production issues. Neglecting robust data management and schema evolution strategies can result in service disruptions, breaking data pipelines, and incurring significant future costs.

In the context of Apache Kafka, schema evolution is managed through a schema registry. As producers share data with consumers via Kafka, the schema is stored in this registry. The Schema Registry enhances the reliability, flexibility, and scalability of systems and applications by providing a standardized approach to manage and validate schemas used by both producers and consumers.

This blog post will walk you through the steps of utilizing Amazon MSK in combination with AWS Glue Schema Registry and Terraform to build a cross-account streaming pipeline for Kafka, complete with built-in schema evolution. This approach provides a comprehensive solution to address your dynamic and evolving data requirements.

GO-ing to production with Bedrock RAG Part 1

Sun, 10 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The way from a cool POC (proof of concept), like a walk in monets garden, to a production-ready application for an RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) application with Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Kendra is paved with some work. Let`s get our hands dirty.

With streamlit and langchain, you can quickly build a cool POC. This two-part blog is about what comes after that.

🇩🇪 Verbesserung der deutschen Suche im Amazon OpenSearch Service

Fri, 08 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Der Amazon OpenSearch Service, der auf dem robusten OpenSearch-Framework basiert, zeichnet sich durch seine bemerkenswerte Geschwindigkeit und Effizienz in Such- und Analysefunktionen aus. Trotz seiner Stärken sind die Standardkonfigurationen des Dienstes möglicherweise nicht vollständig darauf ausgelegt, die spezifischen sprachlichen Herausforderungen bestimmter Sprachen zu bewältigen.

Implementing SAML federation for Amazon OpenSearch Service with KeyCloak

Thu, 07 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome back to our series on implementing SAML Federation for Amazon OpenSearch Service. In our previous post, we explored setting up SAML Federation using OneLogin. Today, we’ll focus on another popular identity provider - Keycloak.

Keycloak is an open-source Identity and Access Management solution, ideal for modern applications and services. We’ll guide you through integrating Keycloak with Amazon OpenSearch Service to implement SAML Federation.

Enhancing German Search in Amazon OpenSearch Service

Mon, 04 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Amazon OpenSearch Service, utilizing the robust OpenSearch framework, excels in search and analytics due to its remarkable speed and efficiency. Despite its strengths, the service’s default configurations might not be fully tailored to address the distinct linguistic challenges encountered in specific languages.

Take German, for example, known for its compound words like “Lebensversicherungsgesellschaft” (life insurance company). Standard tokenization in search technologies treats these compounds as single units, leading to less optimal search results. For improved accuracy, it’s important to index the components of these compounds separately – “Leben” (life), “Versicherung” (insurance), and “Gesellschaft” (company). This approach ensures more precise and effective search outcomes, particularly in languages like German with many compound words.

Centralized traffic filtering using AWS Network Firewall

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In the process of constructing your Hybrid Hub and Spoke Network within the Cloud, which includes the integration of On-Premises networks and allows internet-based access, the implementation of a network firewall is essential for robust security. This security measure involves thorough traffic analysis and filtering between the entities to safeguard against both internal and external cyber threats and exploits. By actively monitoring and inspecting the flow of traffic, a network firewall plays a crucial role in identifying and blocking vulnerability exploits and unauthorized access attempts.

Within the AWS ecosystem, the AWS Network Firewall is a service that is often used for achieving a high level of network security. As a stateful and fully managed network firewall, it includes intrusion detection and prevention capabilities, offering comprehensive protection for VPC-based network traffic.

This blog post aims to guide you through the process of integrating the AWS Network Firewall into your hybrid AWS Hub and Spoke network. By doing so, you can effectively analyze, monitor, and filter both incoming and outgoing network traffic among all involved parties, thereby enhancing the overall security of your infrastructure layer.

Harnessing the Power of Serverless PHP with Laravel Vapor

Mon, 20 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I need to start this blog post with a confession. But only if you promise to not tell anything to my tecRacer colleagues, deal? So, I built a monolith. And I loved it. And you will likely love it too if you decide to try out Laravel. Luckily, there is a service called Vapor that will let you deploy your Laravel project on serverless AWS infrastructure. That means I can continue to enjoy the top-notch developer experience of Laravel while also getting all the benefits of serverless technologies (plus, I can maintain a healthy relationship with my colleagues 🎉). But let’s start at the beginning.

Build Golden AMIs with Packer and AWS CodePipeline

Thu, 16 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

When leveraging AWS services such as EC2, ECS, or EKS, achieving standardized and automated image creation and configuration is essential for securely managing workloads at scale. The concept of a Golden AMI is often used in this context. Golden AMIs represent pre-configured, hardened and thoroughly tested machine images that encompass a fully configured operating system, essential software packages, and customizations tailored for specific workload. It is also strongly recommended to conduct comprehensive security scans during the image creation process to mitigate the risk of vulnerabilities.

By adopting Golden AMIs, you can ensure consitent configuration across different environments, leading to decreased setup and deployment times, fewer configuration errors, and a diminished risk of security breaches.

In this blog post, I would like to demonstrate how you can leverage AWS CodePipeline and AWS Stepfunctions, along with Terraform and Packer, to establish a fully automated pipeline for creating Golden AMIs.

Import existing resources into an AWS CloudFormation Stack

Mon, 30 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Presentation Deploying resources with infrastructure as code is the recommended way to provision resources in AWS. The native AWS-way of doing it is by using Cloudformation or CDK (Cloud Development Kit), and you should of course do this from day one. But in real world sometimes somebody provisioned resources via the console, or there is a need of refactor your code and split your stack into multiple stacks. Luckily It is not very often we have cases where it’s required to import resources.

Climb the (bed)rock with Python, Javascript and GO

Sun, 22 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Bedrock is now available in eu-central-1. It’s time to get real and use it in applications. Reading all blog posts about Bedrock, you might get the impression that Python and LangChain is the only way to do it. Quite the opposite! As Bedrock makes calling the models available as AWS API, all AWS SDKs are supported! This post shows how to use Bedrock with Python, Javascript and GO.

SAP HANA High Availability on AWS - How tecRacer helped secure cash register operations for Germany's leading department store chain

Thu, 05 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Galeria Karstadt Kaufhof and tecRacer have been collaborating on developing Galeria’s Cloud Platform for many years with tecRacer as their Go-To Partner for everything related to AWS. The work we have been doing ranges from designing, setting up and operating their landing zone and network infrastructure, managing platform security and cost optimizations all the way to deploying complex system architectures such as Kubernetes. Most notably, we have been one of their trusted partners when it comes to their SAP infrastructure on AWS and have supported in many successful SAP system deployments.

AWS Client VPN - Access your Virtual Private Cloud

Wed, 20 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

One of the most unknown options to access a VPC is Client VPN. Nearly all customers I am talking to are using a Bastion Host or similar to access services within their VPC. But what about direct access without any jumps in between? After reading this blog, you can create your own Client VPN.

Stop LLM/GenAI hallucination fast: Serverless Kendra RAG with GO

Wed, 20 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

RAG is a way to approach the “hallucination” problem with LLM: A contextual reference increases the accuracy of the answers. Do you want to use RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) in production? The Python langchain library may be too slow for your production services. So what about serverless RAG in fast GO Lambda?

Teaching boto3 to store floats and datetime objects in DynamoDB

Thu, 07 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In this blog post, we’ll explore how you can teach the DynamoDB Table resource in boto3 (and the client) to store and retrieve Python’s datetime and float objects, which they can’t do natively. We’ll also discuss why you should or shouldn’t do that.

Handling Errors and Retries in StepFunctions

Mon, 28 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

“Everything fails all the time” has been preached to us by Werner Vogels for a few years now. Every engineer working on building and maintaining systems knows this to be true. Distributed systems come with their own kind of challenges, and one of the AWS services that help deal with those is AWS Step Functions. AWS Step Functions allow you to describe workflows as JSON and will execute those workflows for you. In this blog, we’ll explore what happens when things inevitably go wrong and the options the service offers to perform error handling and retries using an example application.

Assigning EKS Namespaces to Node Groups

Fri, 25 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In AWS EKS clusters, there are a couple of use cases for which all pods of a namespace should be automatically scheduled to specific nodes in Kubernetes, including:

Clear allocation of data plane infrastructure (and costs) to teams in large organizations,
Running critical workloads on on-demand nodes and not on spot nodes, or
Using specific hardware, such as GPU, only by workloads that actually require it.

In this post, we will explore how to facilitate that in EKS.

Hybrid DNS resolution using Route 53 Endpoints

Tue, 15 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

When implementing a hybrid cloud solution and connecting your AWS VPCs with corporate data centers, setting up proper DNS resolution across the whole network is an important step to ensure full integration and functionality. In order to accomplish this task, Route53 Inbound and Outbound endpoints can be used. In combination with forwarding rules, they allow you to forward DNS traffic between your AWS VPC and on-premises data centers.

In this blog post, I would like to show you how you can leverage Route53 endpoints in combination with Terraform to establish seamless DNS query resolution across your entire hybrid network.

SBOMs on AWS - what?

Wed, 09 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Like most IT professionals, you might have read the title and googled “SBOM”. Now that you know it stands for “Software Bill of Materials”, read on to see why this will be very important in the next years. And what AWS can do to help you with this concept.

HIVE_CURSOR_ERROR in Athena when reading parquet files written by pandas

Mon, 07 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In a recent project, a colleague asked me to look at a HIVE_CURSOR_ERROR in Athena that they weren’t able to get rid of. Since the error message was not incredibly helpful and the way this error appeared is not that uncommon, I thought writing this may help you, dear reader, and future me when I inevitably forget about it again.

Calculating AWS DocumentDB Storage I/Os

Fri, 04 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Amazon DocumentDB is a fully managed native JSON document database that is mostly compatible with MongoDB. Why mostly? Because it it has a few functional differences from MongoDB and some MongoDB features are not supported. Despite from these limitation, customers benefit from a managed database service that has built-in security, backup integration, scalability and fault-tolerance. This rids customers from many operational burdens. AWS DMS (Database Migration Service) supports the migration from MongoDB to DocumentDB.

Apart from the functional evaluation, pricing should of course be taken into consideration before migrating to DocumentDB as well.

EKS Backup with Velero

Fri, 04 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Velero is a tool to backup the kubernetes cluster state and its persistent volumes. It can be used for disaster recovery or cluster migration. Please refer to the official documentation for a more comprehensive description of use cases. This article describes the baseline setup for the backup to ease the start of backing up your EKS clusters.

Scaling Down EKS Clusters at night

Fri, 04 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Scaling down workloads at night or at the weekends is a common implementation task for companies building on AWS. By running only the applications that need to be available at any point in time, the total consumption of infrastructure resources can be reduced, and thus customers can benefit from the pay-by-use pricing models of cloud providers.

Using AWS Security Hub for EKS Security

Fri, 04 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

kube-bench is a tool for checking kubernetes clusters against requirements defined in the CIS Benchmark. The tool runs locally on a kubernetes node, performs its checks and prompts the outputs to the shell or to files. This is quite unhandy, because it means that a user needs to pick up the logs, store them somewhere and analyze them. A deployment of the tool via kubernetes can ease the process for example with the kubectl logs command, but it is still far from perfect. Luckily, there is an integration in AWS Security Hub.

Multiple Site-to-Site VPN Connections in AWS Hub and Spoke Topology

Thu, 03 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

When setting up an IPSec VPN connection between your AWS network and your corporate data center, the fully-managed AWS Site-to-Site VPN service is a popular choice that often comes to mind. AWS Site-to-Site VPN offers a highly-available, scalable, and secure way to connect your on-premises users and workloads to AWS.

In this blog post, I would like to show you how you can go beyond a simple, static AWS Site-to-Site VPN connection by leveraging dynamically routed Site-to-Site VPNs in combination with a Transit Gateway. This hub and spoke network setup will allow us to employ the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) as well as equal-cost multi-path routing (ECMP) and AWS Global Accelerator to not only exchange routing information between AWS and the corporate data center automatically but also increases the overall VPN throughput and reliability.

Out-of-Band Bootstrapping with Chef on AWS Systems Manager

Tue, 01 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A modern architecture avoids opening any SSH or WinRM/RDP ports to minimize the attack surface of your systems. Instead, management connections like the AWS SSM Agent should be implemented. But some tools, especially in the configuration management sector, still rely on direct access.

Chef Infra is on track to break this limitation with its new support for out-of-band (OoB) bootstrapping using Knife and arbitrary Train transports.

Custom runtime on Amazon Linux 2 - GO outperforms Node (3x) and Python (2x) with AWS Lambda Cold-start time

Sun, 30 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Lambda GO runtime is deprecated until the end of 2023. The new default custom Amazon Linux 2 runtime really speeds things up for GO. Now the cold-start is 2x faster than Python and 3x faster than node!

Performance Boost: 10 Expert Tips for Optimizing Your Amazon OpenSearch Service Cluster

Sat, 08 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Note: An updated version of this post is available here

Querying Local Health Check URLs

Fri, 07 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Do you run software that provides locally available health checks via a webserver only reachable via localhost?

In this blog post, I will show you an architecture that you can use to connect those local health checks to CloudWatch Logs and even receive alarms if things are not going to plan.

4 ways to connect to your EC2 instance

Tue, 04 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Connecting to an EC2 instance is basically a no-brainer. I am using an SSH client and starting a connection to the EC2 instance. In this Blog, I will show you four different ways of connecting. One of them is supposedly highly unknown to most people.

Replace Local Cronjobs with EventBridge/SSM

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Every machine has recurring tasks. Backups, updates, runs of configuration management software like Chef, small scripts, …

But one of the problems in a cloud environment is visibility. Instead of scheduling dozens of cron jobs or tasks per instance, would it not be nice to have a central service for this?

You already have. And it’s called EventBridge…

Serverless Cross-Account Microservices

Fri, 23 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

When setting up a microservice architecture, each individual service is often owned and managed by a different team. To achieve a higher level of resource isolation, and allow for more granular security and cost management, each service team usually deploys its resources into a dedicated AWS account. While this type of distributed approach offers many benefits in terms of productivity, scalability, and resiliency, it introduces another layer of complexity in regard to AWS cross-account communication and microservice consumption.

In this blog post, I would like to show you how you can leverage AWS services like Amazon API Gateway, Lambda, DynamoDB, and VPC Endpoints in combination with Terraform to build a fully-managed and serverless cross-account microservice architecture.

The cuckoo egg testing lambda

Tue, 20 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Oh, there is an error in my Lambda function. But - what is the event JSON input which caused the error? Oh, I forgot to log the event in my Lambda code. Damned! It would be great to swap the code with a “just dump the event code” and slip it like a cuckoo egg. Afterwards, get the event and restore the old Lambda!

AWS Access Management uncovered: Where do all those 403s come from?

Mon, 19 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In this blog post, I would like to show you the various types of AWS permission management capabilities to generate a better understanding, where access denied API errors (403) may arise from and what ample options there are to grant permissions. One should be familiar with IAM policies to get the most out of the blog.

Simplifying SAP System Deployments with AWS Launch Wizard

Mon, 12 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Setting up enterprise applications can take a lot of work. Especially with software that has been on the market for a long time, a complete reinstallation and configuration can take quite a bit longer. Talking about complex installations, however, there is one final boss with three letters in its name: SAP.

Advanced Credential Rotation for IAM Users with a Grace Period

Fri, 09 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Rotating credentials with grace can be challenging when the underlying service doesn’t support scheduled deletion. Today I will show you how to implement access key rotation for an IAM user while supporting a grace period where both the new and old credentials are valid.

Build a Site-to-Site IPSec VPN with Public Encryption Domain

Mon, 05 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

When setting up IPSec VPN connections between different companies, the connecting parties often require the tunnel to use public IP addresses as the encryption domain. Especially when establishing a connection to telecommunication partners, the usage of public addresses is often mandatory and ensures that there are no overlapping addresses across other connections.

In this blog post, I would like to show you how you can leverage tools like pfSense and VNS3 in combination with Terraform to build a Site-to-Site IPSec VPN connection between AWS and on-premises networks with a public encryption domain.

Run Shell Scripts as Lambda

Wed, 31 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes, developing a fully-fledged Lambda is not feasible, is too much work, or is simply outside of the knowledge domain of the people involved. But what if we could run plain Bash scripts instead?

Build Terraform CI/CD Pipelines using AWS CodePipeline

Tue, 30 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

When deciding which Infrastructure as Code tool to use for deploying resources in AWS, Terraform is often a favored choice and should therefore be a staple in every DevOps Engineer’s toolbox. While Terraform can increase your team’s performance quite significantly even when used locally, embedding your Terraform workflow in a CI/CD pipeline can boost your organization’s efficiency and deployment reliability even more. By adding automated validation tests, linting as well as security and compliance checks you additionally ensure that your infrastructure adheres to your company’s standards and guidelines.

In this blog post, I would like to show you how you can leverage the AWS Code Services CodeCommit, CodeBuild, and CodePipeline in combination with Terraform to build a fully-managed CI/CD pipeline for Terraform.

Demystifying FinOps in Cloud Computing: A Paradigm Shift Towards Effective Financial Management

Fri, 26 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In an era where cloud computing is revolutionizing businesses, the rise of a new discipline called FinOps is commanding attention. Financial Operations, or FinOps, brings a financial lens to the operational aspects of cloud computing, enabling organizations to drive cost efficiency, business value, and growth. But what exactly is FinOps and how can businesses leverage it in the realm of cloud computing? Understanding FinOps FinOps is a cultural shift, a practice that combines systems, best practices, and organizational culture to bring financial accountability to the variable spend model of cloud computing.

Implementing SAML federation for Amazon OpenSearch Service with OneLogin.

Wed, 24 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Amazon OpenSearch Service is a fully-managed solution for interactive log analytics, real-time application monitoring, website search, observability, and more. With a vast customer base, Amazon OpenSearch Service manages hundreds of thousands of clusters and processes trillions of requests monthly. The service provides seamless access for users through SAML-based federation for OpenSearch Dashboards, enabling single sign-on (SSO) on Amazon OpenSearch Service domains using existing identity providers (IdPs) like OneLogin. SAML simplifies the login process by allowing users to access multiple platforms with a single username and password, providing a safer and more convenient online experience.

This guide will walk you through integrating OneLogin with OpenSearch Dashboards for a seamless SSO experience, leveraging Amazon OpenSearch Service’s capabilities.

Cross Account Kafka Streaming: Part 1

Wed, 10 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

When discussing high performant real-time event streaming, Apache Kafka is a tool that immediately comes to mind. Optimized for ingesting and transforming real-time streaming data in a reliable and scalable manner, a great number of companies today rely on Apache Kafka to power their mission-critical applications and data analytics pipelines.

In this blog series, I would like to show you how you can leverage Amazon MSK and Terraform to set up a fully managed, cross-account Apache Kafka streaming pipeline on AWS. In this first part, we will set up the MSK Kafka cluster and producers. The second part will show you how you can set up distributed Kafka clients in different AWS accounts and communicate with the MSK cluster via AWS VPC Endpoints.

Cross Account Kafka Streaming: Part 2

Wed, 10 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In this blog series, I would like to show you how you can leverage Amazon MSK and Terraform to set up a fully managed, cross-account Apache Kafka streaming pipeline on AWS. In the first part, we already set up the MSK Kafka cluster and producers. The second part will show you how you can set up distributed Kafka clients in different AWS accounts and communicate with the MSK cluster via AWS VPC Endpoints.

Serverless Jenkins on ECS Fargate: Part 1

Mon, 08 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

When setting up a Jenkins build server on a physical machine, right-sizing can become a challenging task. Long idle times followed by high, irregular loads make it hard to predict the necessary hardware requirements. One solution to this problem is the deployment of a containerized Controller/Agent-based Jenkins setup and to offload workloads to dedicated, transient agents.

This is the first post of a three-post series. In this series, I would like to show you how you can leverage AWS Fargate and Terraform to deploy a serverless as well as fault-tolerant, highly available, and scalable Jenkins Controller/Agent deployment pipeline.

Serverless Jenkins on ECS Fargate: Part 2

Mon, 08 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This is the second post of a three-post series. In this series, I would like to show you how you can leverage AWS Fargate and Terraform to deploy a serverless as well as fault-tolerant, highly available, and scalable Jenkins Controller/Agent deployment pipeline.

Serverless Jenkins on ECS Fargate: Part 3

Mon, 08 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This is the third post of a three-post series. In this series, I would like to show you how you can leverage AWS Fargate and Terraform to deploy a serverless as well as fault-tolerant, highly available, and scalable Jenkins Controller/Agent deployment pipeline.

Hello Slurm! - Getting started with High Performance Computing on AWS

Fri, 05 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

High Performance Computing or HPC is coming up when thinking about analyzing models or while working at universities and other research and development organizations. In this article I will show you how to setup HPC, giving you some background information how it works in AWS and to run a small script in your own Cluster.

Using AI to generate Terraform Code from actual AWS resources

Wed, 26 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The world is changing, with new AI tools emerging every day. One such tool that has been making waves recently is ChatGPT. It is only the first of many such tools hitting the market, and it urges us to think about the future of our work. I recently used it to help with a standard task that I often perform and was amazed by how well it helped me to automate it.

Restrict AWS Marketplace offerings with private Marketplace

Fri, 21 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

People are constantly stumbling over the AWS Marketplace and their more than 30,000 public offerings. Restricting such a massive amount of products is mainly done with the necessary internal AWS Marketplace policy that you find in a document in document management systems like AWS WorkDocs. What would you say about better restricting the public AWS Marketplace with a private Marketplace?

Streamline Security Group Maintenance in Terraform with Markdown Tables

Fri, 21 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Managing security groups and their rules in AWS infrastructure can become cumbersome and error-prone as your environment grows. In this blog post, I introduce a Terraform solution that simplifies this process by using a Markdown table to define security group rules.

Pass parameters into your AppStream Session with Session Context

Thu, 20 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Most people think AppStream 2.0 sessions are static as you can only run a single image and run static scripts executed as SYSTEM or within the user context. But what happens when you have the requirement to pass parameters into that session?

Livestreaming with Amazon IVS

Sat, 15 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

When thinking about live streaming, most of us will think about streaming providers like Netflix. Thus we are just consuming their media content like series or films. But what about offering live video streams internally, for your customers or others?

Create issues in Jira from Security Hub findings

Fri, 14 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

AWS Security Hub allows you to get and manage an aggregated view of security findings in your AWS Accounts. Different companies require to have all findings tracked within their issue-tracking system, like Jira. Manual interaction is out, so let’s automate its content creation.

Safe Storage - CloudHSM and FSx for NetApp ONTAP (Part 2)

Fri, 14 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In the first part of this blog, we looked into the complexities of provisioning and initializing CloudHSM clusters. To make our safe storage solution functional, we still need more steps: Activation and Connection.

Visualize AWS Security Groups and Rules from Terraform State

Thu, 13 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In an ever-changing AWS environment, maintaining manually created architecture diagrams can be challenging. For this reason, I decided to find an automated solution for generating diagrams based on the Terraform State File. In this blog post, I will introduce a tool that simplifies the maintenance of architecture diagrams, ensuring their accuracy and providing a clear understanding of AWS security groups and their interactions.

Amazon Pinpoint - How it works

Wed, 12 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

If you need omni-channel engagement with your customers to run marketing campaigns, send notifications, or tailored (transactional) messages in bulk, then Amazon Pinpoint is the right tool for you. It allows you to manage your audience and templates and reach customers through email, text, voice messages, custom channels and push or in-app notifications. The provided events and analytics make it easy to track and measure the results of your campaigns and gain valuable insights about customer interactions.

Push-Down-Predicates in Parquet and how to use them to reduce IOPS while reading from S3

Tue, 11 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Working with datasets in pandas will almost inevitably bring you to the point where your dataset doesn’t fit into memory. Especially parquet is notorious for that since it’s so well compressed and tends to explode in size when read into a dataframe. Today we’ll explore ways to limit and filter the data you read using push-down-predicates. Additionally, we’ll see how you can do that efficiently with data stored in S3 and why using pure pyarrow can be several orders of magnitude more I/O-efficient than the plain pandas version.

AWS announces Terraform Support for Service Catalog - is it any good?

Wed, 05 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday, AWS announced support for Terraform Open Source in Service Catalog. For me, this sounds like a game changer! Which is why I had to test it out immediately.

A new simple approach to diagram as code on AWS with CDK and D2

Sun, 02 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A diagram should convey a clear message about the intention of the architecture. For this message, you only need a few primary resources. Most generated diagrams are overloaded. This new app generates a diagram as code from your annotations in the CDK code.

Version Control your Database on AWS using Flyway

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Proper version control is an essential part of a fast-paced, agile development approach and the foundation of CI/CD. Even though databases are an important aspect of nearly every application, database migrations, and schema evolutions are often not versioned and not integrated into the automation process.

In this blog post, I would like to show you how you can leverage Flyway on AWS to version control your schema changes and automate your database migrations.

Enhancing Security in Terraform with AWS Secrets Manager

Thu, 30 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Keeping track of your passwords is already challenging in your personal life. It can be more difficult when you want to build and deploy secure applications in the cloud. Today we’ll show you a few ways of managing secrets in your Terraform deployment. We’ll teach you about common pitfalls like the random_password resource and more appropriate alternatives.

Jump off the @Edge - CloudFront Functions

Mon, 27 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Have you ever heard about CloudFront Functions as an alternative to Lambda@Edge when doing redirects within CloudFront? In this post I will give you an example of the different steps for an implementation of both variants with the same result.

The beating heart of SQS - of Heartbeats and Watchdogs

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Using SQS as a queue to buffer tasks is probably the most common use case for the service. Things can get tricky if these tasks have a wide range of processing durations. Today, I will show you how to implement an SQS consumer that utilizes heartbeats to dynamically extend the visibility timeout to accommodate different processing durations.

Creating a CSV Decimal Converter Tool: A Chatbot's Perspective

Wed, 22 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This blog post was completely generated by ChatGPT and not modified in any way.

As an AI language model, my purpose is to assist and empower users with diverse tasks, from answering questions to helping develop custom tools. Recently, an IT consultant approached me for help in creating a Python script to convert a CSV file from US decimal format to German decimal format.

Having fun @work: AWS GameDay

Tue, 21 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Joining an AWS Training allows you to learn new things for your daily work. Attending a training commonly happens in groups of up to 13 people and has more of a frontal teaching character. An alternative event are workshops are more practical and done in a small group. And now, a third solution brings teams and people together and plays a competitive game: AWS GameDays.

Secretless Terraform Deployments

Tue, 21 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

When deploying AWS infrastructure via Terraform, the usage of long-term IAM credentials is often the go-to method. Even though convenient, long-term credentials and secrets can pose a serious security risk to your organization if leaked.

This post will show you how you can leverage AWS IAM OpenID Connect identity providers in combination with GitHub Actions and identity federation to implement a secretless Terraform deployment pipeline…using Terraform.

Open Policy Agent for AWS and Terraform

Fri, 17 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

While traditional Infrastructure as Code tools offer a multitude of benefits, they usually fail to meet the security and compliance requirements of modern security-focused organizations when managing infrastructure at scale.

This post will show you how you can leverage Open Policy Agent and Policy as Code to automate security and compliance procedures as well as enforce custom policies across an organization at scale.

The story of how an undocumented API call became an official one: List deleted secrets from AWS Secrets Manager with the CLI

Fri, 17 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This is the story of how an undocumented API call became an official one.

Docker Architecture - Intel? ARM? both?

Thu, 16 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Up to a few years back, writing Dockerfiles was easy. In many cases, it still is - unless you are working with a mixed fleet of Intel and ARM-based processors. Are you familiar with this situation and you do not want to maintain two almost identical Dockerfiles? There is a solution…

Arm your GitHub Actions Runners using AWS Graviton

Tue, 14 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

GitHub does not support any ARM GitHub Actions Runner. So what now? Build it within your AWS environment! The results are pretty cool: You have full control over the Runners and have no more time constraints like long-running workflows that consume Runners usage minutes. I will guide you through the basics of creating an AWS EC2 instance and installing the minimum requirements on the OS for having a running GitHub Actions Runner.

Safe Storage - CloudHSM and FSx for NetApp ONTAP (Part 1)

Fri, 10 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Serverless Swagger UI for AWS API Gateway

Tue, 07 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

When implementing REST APIs in AWS there is one service that always comes to mind - Amazon API Gateway. Even though feature-rich, properly documenting your API may become a time-consuming task relatively quickly.

In this post, I would like to show you how you can use Swagger UI in combination with a serverless deployment to automatically generate interactive and up-to-date documentation for your APIs.

Getting Started with QuickSight Analyses

Mon, 06 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

AWS BI Solution Amazon QuickSight is a powerful tool to build interactive analyses or dashboards. In this blog post we will see how to get started with designing such analyses.

Building an AWS Lambda Telemetry API extension for direct logging to Grafana Loki

Sun, 12 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In hybrid architectures, serverless functions work together with container solutions. Lambda logs have to be translated when you don`t choose CloudWatch Logs. The old way of doing this is through subscription filters using additional Lambda functions for log transformation. With the Lambda Telemetry API there is a more elegant, performant and cost-effective way. I am using Grafana Loki as a working example and show you how to build a working Lambda-Loki Telemetry APi extension.

Step functions and the source

Wed, 08 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Possibilities of using AWS Step Functions are widespread. Most times, filtering out the necessary content is done within Lambda Functions or other services. With this blog, I will show you how to prevent this within Lambda using in- and output filters in AWS Step Functions.

Finding EBS Boot Volumes

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I got a question on how to find boot volumes of AWS instances. While I did not get any background on the purpose of this, I found the task interesting enough to dig a bit deeper. As in “down to the binary level”. Interested?

Can ChatGPT tackle the AWS Certification Challenge?

Sun, 29 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Artificial Intelligence has come a long way since its inception, and today we have AI services that can perform tasks with remarkable accuracy and efficiency. One such AI service is ChatGPT, a cutting-edge language model developed by OpenAI that can generate human-like text responses to questions and commands. With the ability to process vast amounts of information in real-time, ChatGPT is revolutionizing the way we interact with technology, making it possible to receive quick and accurate answers to a wide range of questions, without the need for human intervention.

What are the folders in the S3 console?

Fri, 13 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

When you start out learning about S3, the experts and documentation will tell you that you should think of S3 as a flat key-value store that doesn’t have any hierarchical structure. Then you go ahead and create your first S3 bucket in the console, and what the interface shows you is a nice big “Create Folder” button. You may be justifiably confused - didn’t I just learn that there are no folders, directories, or hierarchy in S3?

Place free AMI product on the AWS Marketplace

Wed, 11 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The last time I showed the registration as a seller for the AWS Marketplace. Let’s move on with adding a new free AMI to it. I will bring you into a position to publish your first AMI into the AWS Marketplace as a free version and give you the necessary information on what this means.

FSx for NetApp ONTAP Manageability Options

Fri, 06 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

While Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP (FSxN) seems relatively easy on the AWS level, it is vastly more powerful if you pick another way to manage it.

This post will look at a quick run-down across the AWS Web Console, NetApp’s BlueXP, various APIs, and the CLI.

DevContainers on Windows without Docker for Desktop

Mon, 02 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A while ago, Docker changed licensing terms for their Docker Desktop product. As a result, many companies cannot use Docker for free anymore, which impacts using VSCode DevContainers.

In this blog, I will show you how to solve these licensing issues by using VSCode with WSL and podman instead.

Place products on the AWS Marketplace - Seller registration

Wed, 21 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Let’s go and shop for something. I bet almost everyone of us has heard that sentence in the past. But where do we go then? A Supermarket, shopping center, or marketplace could be one of the answers. For this blog article, I’d like to give you some insights about how to publish your products within the AWS Marketplace.

Serverless Spy Vs. Spy Chapter 3: X-Ray vs Jaeger - Send Lambda traces with open telemetry

Sun, 18 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In modern architectures, Lambda functions co-exist with containers. Cloud Native Observability is achieved with open telemetry. I show you how to send open telemetry traces from Lambda to a Jaeger tracing server. Let’s see how this compares to the X-Ray tracing service.

Hostname Resolution and DNS with SAP on AWS

Wed, 14 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

SAP systems running in a distributed environment have certain requirements regarding how to set the hostname and how those need to be resolved from other hosts. In our test landscape we use virtual hostnames to decouple the SAP instances from the underlying hardware which is running on a Red Hat Linux Server. This blog post will walk you through the components in AWS that fullfil those requirements and allow SAP instances to communicate while keeping administrative effort super low.

Serverless Spy Vs. Spy Chapter 2: AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry Lambda vs X-Ray SDK

Sat, 10 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We know how to follow traces with the X-Ray SDK. Now there is AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry claiming to do this better. Let’s build CDK examples for Lambda with TypeScript/Python/Go and find out who is the better spy in this game.

Using AWS mac1/mac2 Instances with Test Kitchen

Fri, 09 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Everybody who had to write software or work with configuration management for Apple knows of the problems to get access to test machines. AWS does offer both Intel- and M1-based Mac instances now and with kitchen-ec2 v3.15.0 it is finally possible to use them in your existing workflow.

Introduction to asynchronous interactions with the AWS API in Python

Mon, 05 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The world is asynchronous, as Dr. Werner Vogels proclaimed at re:invent 2022. We’ll explore what that assertion means for the Python developers of the world and how we can enable (and benefit from) asynchronous interactions with the AWS API using aioboto3.

Dedicated Hosts with Test Kitchen

Fri, 02 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes, you need to deploy software for tests with special licensing terms. To solve this, AWS offers Dedicated Instances and Dedicated Hosts - and now you can use them with Test Kitchen 3.14 in your developer workflows.

Call SAP RFC Function Modules from AWS Lambda using the NW RFC SDK and Node.js

Mon, 28 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

SAP provides the SAP NetWeaver RFC SDK to allow external systems to call SAP Systems directly via SAP RFC. I will walk you through the steps it took me to deploy a function on AWS Lambda that uses the NW RFC SDK. Once you mastered those, you could use it to call any remote-enabled Function Module from AWS Lambda.

Serverless Spy Vs Spy Chapter 1: X-ray

Sun, 27 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

There are several ways to perform espionage activities in the life of a serverless app, which all battle for your attention. Time for the advent of counterintelligence: We want answers! - And CDK/Source examples of how to use it! Here we go, Serverless spy vs spy in four chapters, each post published after you light the next candle.

VSCode Repository-Level Task Definitions

Fri, 25 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Do you run the same CLI commands again and again while using VSCode? Even if you already put them into code, you find yourself typing things like rake build all the time?

I just learned of VSCode’s integrated Task management the other day, and this knowledge could help you work more productively. So let’s dive deep…

High-level AWS cost benchmark in European regions (including new Zurich region!)

Wed, 09 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

As the new AWS region in Zurich has just been launched, I am wondering about the costs of AWS infrastructure in that region. So I decided to perform a small benchmark to get a better feeling about this.

Test-Kitchen on AWS (2022 edition)

Wed, 02 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Test-Kitchen is a tool to manage your test machine lifecycle, similar to HashiCorp Vagrant. While it has been developed with Chef in mind, it can be used with any development tool to test on new machines every time you change your code.

As this tool continues to evolve and many examples are outdated, today I will give you some small snippets to reuse and get going quickly.

Don't kill it with iron! How many pods can I start on an EKS node?

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Every EC2 instance type has a limited number of ENIs and IP addresses that it can use. This can quickly cause EKS to not being able to schedule more pods on a node. Luckily, there is a simple solution for that.

10 years and one month: speed up website hosting on AWS in four steps

Wed, 26 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

There is no (milli)second chance for the first impression. Many websites today mess this up badly. When I need to wait 10 seconds for the content to load - I am out. What about you? I show you how to optimize the speed in four steps with S3, CloudFront and Amplify.

On-Prem Airflow to MWAA

Tue, 25 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Transforming large amounts of data into formats that help solve business problems is what data engineers excel at. A combination of Serverless tools such as Athena, StepFunctions, Lambda, or Glue can get the job done in many projects. However, some customers prefer to rely on Open-Source projects and tools to access more talent in the job market and be less reliant on a single cloud provider. Today, we’ll share a story of a modernization project that we did for a customer in the online marketing industry.

Implementing Pessimistic Locking with DynamoDB and Python

Fri, 21 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I will show you how to implement pessimistic locking using Python with DynamoDB as our backend. Before we start, we’ll review the basics and discuss some of the design criteria we’re looking for. In an earlier post, I outlined to you how to implement optimistic locking using DynamoDB. There, I explained some of the reasons why locking is useful and which issues it can prevent. If you’re unfamiliar with the topic, I suggest you check that one out first.

Hardware TOTP for AWS: Reiner SCT tanJack Deluxe

Wed, 19 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Even when safely storing your MFA tokens using the Token2 Molto-2 device, some things are not quite optimal. You have to use special Windows-only software to program new accounts, it is not PIN-protected, and things could be better in terms of usability.

If you have a bit more of a budget, the Reiner SCT tanJack Deluxe might solve your problems. Let’s have a look at this device.

Setting a proxy in the AWS Application Discovery Service Agentless Collector

Wed, 12 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The new agentless collector for the Application Discovery Service can be used to collect data from VMware vCenter and thus is useful whenever the ADS agent cannot be installed on the servers.

However, AWS “forgot to mention” how to ensure connectivity over a proxy server in environments that do not allow direct internet access. Here`s how I fixed the issue.

First Steps with Amazon Braket SDK

Mon, 10 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In this article, we will install and deploy a circuit with a Bell State using AWS Braket SDK. Some minimal knowledge requirements are expected from the reader, namely concepts such as: Qubit, Superposition, Quantum Logical Gates (and a bit of math by association), Bell State, Python and perhaps AWS CLI.

Hardware TOTP for AWS: Molto-2

Wed, 28 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Everybody knows you should protect your AWS accounts (and other logins) with MFA against brute-force attacks. Most of the account providers use a standardized algorithm (RFC 6238) to generate the famous six-digit TOTP codes for your login.

But where do you store those securely? Today, we will look at the alternatives and a specific device: The Molto-2.

Glue Crawlers: No GetObject, No Problem

Fri, 09 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This is the story of how we accidentally learned more about the internals of Glue Crawlers than we ever wanted to know. Once upon a time (a few days ago), André and I were debugging a crawler that didn’t do what it was supposed to. Before we dive into that, maybe some background on Crawlers first. Glue Crawlers are used to create tables in the Glue Data Catalog. They crawl, i.

Managing volatile Terraform Deployments with AWS CodeBuild and Step Functions

Sat, 03 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I was searching for an AWS-native solution that would deploy resources via Terraform, allow them to do some work, and then destroy them properly without leaving any orphaned resources. Also, multiple of those Terraform deployments needed to be live at the same time.

The solution I found is a combination of AWS CodeBuild, AWS Step Functions, a Terraform State being managed in S3 and Terraform Workspaces.

Find all Lambda-Runtimes in all Accounts: Multi Account Query with steampipe and TASFKAS (the AWS service formerly known as SSO *)

Fri, 26 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

You have got some mails from AWS: [Action Required] AWS Lambda end of support for Node.js 12 [Action Required] AWS Lambda end of support for Python 3.6 [Solution Required] Search all Lambdas in multiple accounts.

[Solution Found] Steampipe with AWS multi-account support. Multi-account management is like managing all the arms of a Kraken. I will show you a fast and straightforward solution for this. (* the new offical name is IAM Identity Center, but I think TASFKAS would also fit 😉)

Prepopulate Lambda Console Testevents without dirty manual work using Terraform

Fri, 12 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

You like Lambda testevents? Great! But with “automate everything”, manual console clicks are considered dirty! Keep your hand clean by automating the creation of Lambda test events. So you can give your team, and yourself prepopulated test events. This example shows you the terraform code - because this is the fastest way. With a little effort, you can translate it to CloudFormation or AWS-CDK!

Waiting for things to happen and paginating responses with boto3

Fri, 17 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In this blog, we’ll look at two features in boto3/botocore that are often overlooked - Pagination and Waiters. In addition to that, we’ll explore how these are implemented under the hood.

FSx for ONTAP Backups

Wed, 15 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In our FSx for NetApp ONTAP series, we continue to one of the most vital topics: Backups. But did you know there are two types of backup with this service? Let’s compare the native backup and AWS Backup in this post.

What is a Quantum Ledger Database?

Mon, 13 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Update 2024: QLDB will be discontinued in mid 2025, don’t use it for new projects. This blog introduces you to a database that solves an interesting niche problem: Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB). We’ll get to the service later, but first, I’m going to set the stage by describing a problem that the service can solve. I’m going to tell you a story - not my own story but one that happened to a colleague.

Multi-AZ Block Storage for EKS - Architecture

Fri, 10 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

On the heels of the recent announcement of our consulting offer for multi-AZ block storage for EKS, it is worth discussing some of the base technologies. Let’s look into the idea and how it works under the hood.

Multi-AZ Block Storage for EKS - New Consulting Offer

Thu, 09 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Today we announce a new consulting offer on the AWS Marketplace: Multi-AZ Block Storage for EKS. Finally, you can use block-based storage for your specialized workloads, which is highly available.

Multi-AZ Block Storage for EKS - Solution Overview

Thu, 09 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Did you already encounter an application on EKS which does not perform well with EFS storage or which even needs dedicated block storage with multi-AZ capabilities? In this case, we have prepared something for you:

We now support you with creating multi-AZ block storage for your EKS clusters and add facilities to monitor, manage and troubleshoot them with easy building blocks.

New AWS Config Rules - LambdaLess and rust(y)

Wed, 01 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

AWS Config checks all your resources for compliance. With 260 managed rules, it covers a lot of ground. But if you need additional checks until now, you had to write a complex Lambda function. With the new “Custom Policy” type, it is possible to use declarative Guard rules. Custom Policy rules use less lines of code and are so much easier to read.

Enable Autocomplete for boto3 in VSCode

Tue, 31 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

One of the less pleasant aspects of working with AWS using Python is the fact that most IDEs aren’t able to natively support Autocomplete or IntelliSense for the AWS SDK for Python (boto3) because of the way boto3 is implemented. Today I’m going to show you how easy it has become to enable Autocomplete for boto3 in VSCode. Before we come to the solution, let’s talk about why native Autocomplete doesn’t work with boto3.

Getting a near-real-time view of a DynamoDB stream with Python

Fri, 27 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

DynamoDB streams help you respond to changes in your tables, which is commonly used to create aggregations or trigger other workflows once data is updated. Getting a near-real-time view into these Streams can also be helpful during developing or debugging a Serverless application in AWS. Today, I will share a Python script that I built to hook into DynamoDB streams. Before we begin, I suggest you read my blog post that contains a deep dive into DynamoDB streams and how they’re implemented because we’ll be using these concepts today.

Getting started with testing DynamoDB code in Python

Fri, 20 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Testing is one of the most critical activities in software development and using third-party APIs like DynamoDB in your code comes with challenges when writing tests. Today, I’ll show you how you can start writing tests for code that accesses DynamoDB from Python.

Putting the database to sleep using Lambda - a Python developer's first contact with Golang

Wed, 11 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In this blog, I take you along on my journey to build my first Golang-based Lambda function. Inspired by surprise on my RDS bill, I built a Lambda function in Go to periodically stop running databases with a specific tag. Come, learn and debug with me!

Glue Crawlers don't correctly recognize Ion data - here's how you fix that

Tue, 03 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Amazon Ion is one of the data serialization formats you can use when exporting data from DynamoDB to S3. Recently, I tried to select data from one of these exports with Athena after using a Glue Crawler to create the schema and table. It didn’t work, and I got a weird error message. In this post, I’ll show you how to fix that problem. If you’re not familiar with Ion yet, check out my recent blog post introducing it for more details.

What is Amazon Ion, and how can I read and write it in Python?

Tue, 26 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Amazon Ion is a data serialization format that was open-sourced by Amazon in 2016 and is used internally at the company. Over time it has also been introduced into some AWS services and is the data format that services like the Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB) use. It has also started to appear in more commonly used services, so I think it’s worth taking a closer look at. This article will explain what Ion is, its benefits, and how you can use it in Python.

Logging Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP

Fri, 22 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, I spent a lot of time using the exciting new member of the FSx family. One detail made working with it a bit unpleasant, though - the lack of log files.

This post details how to create a custom integration into CloudWatch Logs and make ONTAP audit logs visible.

Lambda Destinations can improve success- and error handling for asynchronous Lambda Functions

Tue, 19 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Lambda destinations enable you to respond to successful or failed asynchronous invocations in a way that wasn’t possible before the feature was added. I explain what this feature allows you to do and show you how to use it.

About Optimizing for Speed: How to do complete AWS Security&Compliance Scans in 5 minutes

Thu, 14 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The project steampipe uses a fast programing language and an intelligent caching approach outrunning prowler speed tenfold. While I tried to workaround prowlers limits I learned a lot about optimizing.

Understanding Apache Airflow on AWS

Tue, 12 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Apache Airflow doesn’t only have a cool name; it’s also a powerful workflow orchestration tool that you can use as Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA) on AWS. This post will explain which problems the service solves, how you can get started, and the most important concepts you need to understand.

IAM Conditions - Force providing specific tags during resource creation

Thu, 07 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We can use permissions boundaries to give developers and teams more freedom to create their own resources. For forcing them to provide specific tags during resource creation, we need a deeper understanding of how this can be achieved. We talk about the example of creating a security group.

Implementing accurate counters in DynamoDB using Python

Tue, 05 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Counters can be used in all kinds of situations like gathering statistics about websites or billing systems. In this post we’ll dive deep into ways you can use DynamoDB to implement atomic and accurate counters using examples in Python.

Deep Dive into DynamoDB streams and the Lambda integration

Tue, 29 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

You have probably seen architectures that use DynamoDB streams to perform change data capture on tables and Lambda functions to process those changes before. Today, we’ll do a deep dive into the underlying technology and explore how we can configure and tweak this configuration to our advantage.

Using Permission Boundaries to balance Security and Developer Productivity

Tue, 22 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

There is a conflict between developer freedom and the requirements of security teams. In this post we’ll look at one approach to address this tension: permission boundaries. They’re an often overlooked part of IAM, but provide a valuable addition to our security toolkit.

Introduction to MQTT and AWS IoT Core

Tue, 15 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

MQTT is one of the core protocols that enables IoT applications. In this post we’ll first introduce MQTT and some of the core concepts. We’ll also take a look at AWS IoT Core, the MQTT broker that comes bundled in AWS.

Sneaky Injections - CloudFormation

Sat, 12 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

During one of our recent AWS Security Reviews, I ran across an interesting technique that attackers can use to create a backdoor in AWS accounts. It works by using three S3 IAM actions, CloudFormation, and an administrator who is not careful enough.

This vector is not new but still scary - and today, I will show you how to check your account for this risk and any previous compromises.

Scheduling dev.to posts with Honeycode

Tue, 08 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I explain how I built an app that uses Honeycode and an API Gateway backed by a Lambda Function to schedule my blog posts on dev.to.

Honeycode changed my mind about no-code

Tue, 01 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Most enterprises largely run on Excel. Imagine there was a tool that empowers spreadsheet specialists to build web and mobile apps without writing code. Amazon Honeycode tries to do that. We’ll explore if it’s as powerful as it sounds.

Do you do Lambda Spaghetti?

Fri, 25 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Last week in the AWS slack developer channel once again, somebody was asking: “How can I run a Lambda locally?”. Well, that is a valid question, but there is a chance that you only think you need a local Lambda emulator because you do Lambda Spaghetti! Spaghetti code is a phrase for unstructured and difficult-to-maintain source code. I show you an easier way to test Lambdas locally and have some arguments that a local Lambda runtime should only be the very last resort. On top, you get examples in Pasta-Python, Gemelli-Go and Tortellini-Typescript.

Building QuickSight Datasets with CDK - Athena

Wed, 23 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In a previous blog post we built QuickSight Datasets by directly loading files from S3. In the wild the data in S3 is often already aggregated or even transformed in Athena. In this new blog post we see how to create a QuickSight Dataset directly relying on Athena.

How the Application Load Balancer works

Tue, 22 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Load Balancers are a key component in scalable and fault tolerant architectures. The basic idea is fairly simple, but the implementation involves a fair bit of complexity. In this post I‘ll explain the different components, how they interact, and how requests flow through a load-balanced architecture.

How ALIAS records can reduce initial load times for your website

Tue, 15 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

DNS is a core component of the internet. In this post we’ll briefly take a look at how it works and what the difference between CNAME and ALIAS records in Amazon Route53 are.

How To Hybrid! - Secure AWS Environment Service Access

Wed, 09 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

As AWS Cloud adoption becomes more widespread throughout the industries, challenges arise how to govern IT resource usage and implement a coherent management for systems across on-premises and the AWS Cloud. This blog post gives insights in how the AWS offered Systems Manager capabilities could be extended from the cloud environment to your hybrid and on-premises environments.

Working around Glue's habit of dropping unsuspecting columns

Tue, 08 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This point explains how to work around Glue’s problem of selective amnesia when creating Dynamic Frames from the Glue data catalog.

How do the AWS instances compare to commercially available graphic cards?

Fri, 04 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In this post we would like to show a performance comparison between a g5-instance and the highend graphics card ASUS STRIX RTX3090 OC.

Use the CDK to trigger your Lambda function in sub-minute intervals

Tue, 01 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In this post I’ll show you how to trigger your Lambda functions in intervals smaller than a minute using StepFunctions and the CDK.

A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing - Hidden EC2 Permissions

Thu, 27 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

During some R&D for a new blog post, I experimented with IAM conditions in Trust Policies. Some small mistakes during this led to instances that have limited privileges according to the AWS Web Console and CLI. But in reality, they can work with administrative permissions for a few hours - unnoticed.

Have I piqued your interest? Let’s see how to reproduce this effect then.

Solving Hive Partition Schema Mismatch Errors in Athena

Tue, 25 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Working with CSV files and Big Data tools such as AWS Glue and Athena can lead to interesting challenges. In this blog I will explain to you how to solve a particular problem that I encountered in a project - the HIVE_PARTITION_SCHEMA_MISMATCH.

Lambda SQS Event Filters may delete your messages if you're not careful

Tue, 18 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Lambda Event filters are a great addition to our serverless toolbox and allow us to both simplify our code as well as save money. That’s great, but they can also delete messages from your SQS-queues if you’re note careful. In this post I’m going to show you what to watch out for.

Enhance Lambda Security with new Amazon Inspector Vulnerability Management and prevent 'log4jgate'

Fri, 14 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Detect the crack in the window (or the lambda library) before it breaks:

As we have seen during the last month, also well known libraries like log4j can have previously unknown vulnerabilities.

Therefore scanning your Lambda application before deploying is not enough! What happens if a new cybersecurity vulnerability occurs while your functions are running? Solution: Amazon Inspector. Only problem: it`s not available for Lambda yet. Fortunately, you can deploy Lambda with container images and Inspector will continuously scan these images for you.

Want to know how set up Lambda & Inspector and see how evil Node vulnerabilities are detected? Read on!

Simplify your code and save money with Lambda Event Filters

Tue, 11 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In this post I’m going to explore how the new event filters in AWS Lambda can be used to implement the data model for a video streaming website in DynamoDB. I’ll explain why this feature makes your code simpler and allows you to save money in the process.

The CDK Book: The missing Go Code Examples

Sun, 09 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The CDK Book The CDK Book “A Comprehensive Guide to the AWS Cloud Development Kit” is a book by Sathyajith Bhat, Matthew Bonig, Matt Coulter, Thorsten Hoeger written end of 2021. Because the CDK itself is polyglott with jsii, the TypeScript examples are automatically translated in other languages. So the example CDK code used in the book is jsii generated, and there are samples for TypeScript, Python, Java and C#.

One Step Closer to IPv6

Fri, 07 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Over many years, we have now read warnings about the exhaustion of available IPv4 addresses. So far, there still seem to be ways and ideas on how to extend their lifetime (by approaching large organizations, using NAT, re-dedication of 240.0.0.0/4, and so on).

Switching over to the much-dreaded IPv6 sounds easy, but even minor things can still cause problems.

So what is the current state of AWS with this topic? And how did the landscape change during re:Invent 2021?

How to ingest MQTT data from VerneMQ into your Data Lake using IoT Core

Tue, 04 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This post explains how you can ingest data from a MQTT broker such as VerneMQ into your data lake via IoT Core and Kinesis Data Firehose. We’ll set up a data processing pipeline from start to finish in Terraform.

Views of the Pyramids: From a monolithic Test process to a Serverless Test Automation with CodeBuild

Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Comparing the development methodology of a monolithic program to a Serverless IAC application you will see that the power of DevOps lies in automating everything. I will show you a working example of a serverless CI pipeline with automated unit, integration and end2end test and test reports in CodeBuild. The full source is written GO, with references to Node.JS and python for the test parts.

Can AWS re:Post replace stackoverflow?

Tue, 07 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

AWS launched re:Post as a successor to the AWS forums and it looks suspiciously similar to stackoverflow. In this post I take a first look at the platform and try to find out if it’s good enough to drive traffic away from stackoverflow.

Using PySpark and AWS Glue to analyze multi-line log files

Fri, 03 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Logfile analytics with Spark is tricky. One of the common problems are multi-line logs. In this post I explain to you how you can use PySpark to get your multi-line logs into a structured data frame.

NetApp DataSense on AWS

Tue, 30 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Over the last years, demands and expectations on data security have increased dramatically. The main drivers are local data privacy regulations like the EU-GDPR, which imply awareness of sensitive data and an overview of potential risks.

Amazon has offered its service Macie in 2017, added new capabilities lately, and is doing a great job with data on S3. But how do you include your EFS/FSx file shares and RDS databases to eliminate blind spots? Meet NetApp Cloud DataSense.

Airgapped Testing - VMware Edition

Mon, 22 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, I got a bug report for the kitchen-vcenter driver, which allows lifecycle management of testing VMs on VMware vCenter environments. Apparently, a customer tried to create a VM without any network interface.

The problem was that this crashed in a very unintuitive way. But it made me wonder: Would it be possible to use non-networked machines for tests? It turns out: That’s absolutely possible!

Cloud Driven Development Workshop@devopenspace

Fri, 19 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This is a live Blog from the workshop “Cloud Driven Development” on https://devopenspace.de/.

Forget a lot of what you know about classic full-stack development. Together, we’ll dive into cloud-driven software development and build a sample serverless application in AWS.

This blog was build live during the workshop on November 2021. So it`s not a complete reference, just a few hints to test and deploy the infrastructure and the applications.

Lambda Container Deployment with CDK: Using Arm based Lambda with GO

Wed, 10 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

End of September 2021, AWS announced Graviton 2 powered Lambda Functions. The announcement post says “All Lambda runtimes built on top of Amazon Linux 2, including the custom runtime, are supported on Arm…”. Not all languages out of the box, for using GO as fast language on a fast Graviton processor, you have to use Docker based deployment. Here I show you a simple - CDK powered way to do that.

Darf ich als deutscher Finanzdienstleister in die Cloud?

Thu, 04 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Viele Unternehmen und insbesondere solche in der Finanzbranche stellen sich die Frage, ob sie ihre IT oder Teile dieser überhaupt in die Cloud migrieren dürfen. Ja, die Cloud skaliert gut, sie schafft bessere Verfügbarkeit lokal wie global, sie fördert Agilität, erleichtert den Zugang zu neuen Technologien und kann in vielen Fällen auch Sicherheitsvorteile schaffen. Aber wie die rechtliche Situation bei einer Auslagerung an Public Cloud-Anbieter aussieht, steht nochmal auf einem anderen Blatt Papier.

Update your Style in Test Kitchen (Part 2)

Mon, 25 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

It is time for a follow-up to my blog post from last year - especially as Test Kitchen 3.0 changed some defaults. Let’s check some cargo-culted settings out in this blog post.

Third Party Platform Support for Chef

Thu, 14 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Currently, users of Chef are limited to working with the platforms supported by the Chef core. But with the advancements of Target Mode, the story could change quickly. Learn about the idea of a “Platform Support Pack” and what it could mean for the future.

Testing Terraform with InSpec (Part 2)

Fri, 08 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In this post, we will set it all up for easy working in Visual Studio Code. Let’s start!

Testing Terraform with InSpec (Part 1)

Fri, 01 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

While Infrastructure-as-Code slowly becomes omnipresent, many of the communicated advantages of the approach stay mostly unrealized. Sure, code style checks (linting) and even automated documentation get more common every month. But one of the cornerstones often gets ignore: testing. Let’s see which types of code testing are available and how to do it without writing too much code. The promise of the Infrastructure-as-Code (short: IaC) movement is to handle infrastructure just as if it was a program.

Building QuickSight Datasets with CDK - S3

Tue, 28 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

AWS BI solution Amazon QuickSight provides a neat and powerful web console to handle most use cases. Nevertheless, as soon as a need for automation appears, relying on IaC can help increase productivity.

Be Aware of EBS Direct APIs

Fri, 17 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, I blogged about a security incident where CloudTrail was not set up to log S3 data events. But while this is the most common type of data events, there are some more. And one of them has really scary implications. But good news: you can protect yourself about that.

How To Hybrid! - AWS Systems Manager Patch Management

Wed, 15 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

CloudTrail Data Events

Thu, 09 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In today’s post, I will talk about a hacking investigation I recently took part in. We will look into what went wrong, what the attackers did, and how we can improve detection and prevention to manage such incidents better.

Chef Technology Partner of the Year

Wed, 08 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

To our pleasant surprise, Chef awarded tecRacer the “2021 Technology Partner of the Year” title at the opening keynote of ChefConf 2021.

Map out your IAM with PMapper

Fri, 20 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Writing “Least Privilege” policies is an art in itself, but it inevitably leads to a large number of JSON-based policies in your accounts. As one of the rules of good security is “low maintainability = low security”, let’s dive into tools which can show us risks inside our policies - which might even result in paths to administrative privileges!

IAM: What happens when you assume a role?

Fri, 13 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

IAM Roles are a critical security feature in AWS. Handling them is not very intuitive in the beginning. In this blog post we take a look behind the curtain and explain what’s going on when you assume a role.

Secure Backup Solution for OnPremises and Hybrid Environments

Wed, 28 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

With current ransomware attacks it is important to have a reliable backup strategie in place. With Veeam Backup & Replication you are able to backup your on-premises and hybrid environments and extend your storage solution with AWS Cloud capabilities to increase capacity and archiving storage with AWS S3 service.

Implementing optimistic locking in DynamoDB with Python

Tue, 13 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Concurrent access to the same items in DynamoDB can lead to consistency problems. In this post I explain why that is and introduce optimistic locking as a technique to combat this issue.

CDK Infrastructure Testing - Part 2b - Unit, Integration and Application Test for Serverless Lambda Functions

Sun, 04 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

After describing the context of the test pyramid for Infrastructure as Code in part 1, and the Web Application in Part 2a - let`s apply that to some Lambda function.

Containers! Containers everywhere!

Tue, 29 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The newly introduced ECS Anywhere feature lets us use our existing resources as Compute Power in Amazon ECS. Let’s talk about some basics and see how ECS Anywhere can be set up in Terraform!

What I wish somebody had explained to me before I started to use AWS Glue

Tue, 22 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

There are many components under the Glue umbrella that can fit together into a cohesive big picture. In this introduction to Glue I’m explaining my version of this big picture.

CDK Infrastructure Testing - Part 2a - Implement Unit, Integration and Application Test for CDK Infrastructure and an EC2 Web Server Application

Sun, 20 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

With CDK you create Infrastructure as Code - IaC. You can automate the test for the IaC code. The three test tastes -Unit, Integration and Application- should work closely together. Here I show you how. It is like the three steps of coffee tasting: 1 smell, 2 Taste, 3 Feel.

Least Privilege - Semi-Automated

Fri, 11 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In almost every tutorial on AWS you will come across the term “Least Privilege”. Writing IAM policies properly requires lots of research and time - that’s the reason why many projects still rely on AWS Managed Policies or write exploitable policies. But there are tools to help you along.

CIT - Build CDK Infrastructure Testing - Part 1 - Terratest and the Integrated Integration

Sun, 23 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR You don`t need a DSL to do easy integration testing. With CDK available in go, infrastructure test can be programmed with GO packages easily.

Implementing and deploying Custom Resources using CDK

Mon, 10 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

CDK doesn’t offer every type of resource by default. Custom Resources allow us to overcome this limitation. Anything that can be created within a Lambda function, can be deployed as a Custom Resource, with its lifecycle being managed by CDK/CloudFormation. This blog posts explains how to set this up using the example of an user in a SimpleAD.

Stay single - AWS SSO on the cli with distributed CodeCommit Repositories

Fri, 07 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR with aws-sso-util and awsume sso and codecommmit is easy

Terraform OS Detection

Wed, 05 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In some rare cases it is important to know on which Operating System Terraform is being executed. Since there is (yet) no functionality that solves this by Terraform this hack can help in these situations.

Assessing compliance with AWS Audit Manager

Mon, 19 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction As in traditional IT infrastructures, firms in regulated industries such as banks or energy providers have strict security requirements to comply with when using public cloud providers as well. However, cloud adoption is often driven by application development teams that are striving for increased speed and agility to launch new features in their application, but don’t care too much about those regulatory requirements. That makes it particularly important for IT governance functions to have effective tools to evaluate compliance with the aforementioned standards and gather evidence that can be provided to their internal or external auditors.

Working with lists in DynamoDB

Thu, 15 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

DynamoDB supports complex data types like lists. In this post we take a look at different ways to interact with lists. We will use Python to write code that may be used in a data access layer to manipulate items with list attributes.

Building a Serverless Webapp with Amplify and Quasar - Day 3

Thu, 08 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I was helping a customer with a Amplify App. This later turned into a meetup, where we are building a photo sorting application using AWS Amplify for the backend and Quasar for the frontend. This is the third article in a series that lets you follow along with the development process in your own time.

Easy going - programming AWS Resources with the CDK in GO

Wed, 07 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

CDK GO is in preview, here are the pros and cons and a first VPC example

TL;DR The GO module system is IMHO neater than node.JS or Python. But you have to get used to the strongly typed language GO.

CDK Lambda Deployment takes about a minute - how about sub second Function Code Deployment?

Sun, 04 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

CDK Lambda Deployment takes about a minute - how about sub second Function Code Deployment?

Creation of Lambda infrastructure with the CDK is really powerful. Updating the Function code is really slow. Here is a fix for that to get to a sub-second Lambda function deployment time.

Insider Story - Nadim Yonis

Thu, 01 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

We, as tecRacer, thrive on our individual and unique employees. In our new series “Insider Stories” Nadim will tell you how he found his way to the company as well as how he experiences working for tecRacer.

Complexity costs: Read performance for nested DynamoDB items with different Lambda configurations

Tue, 23 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

DynamoDB allows us to store complex data structures and deeply nested objects, but this complexity isn’t free. In this post we take a look at how different Lambda configurations impact the read times from boto3. We examine how different resource configurations can improve the read time of the same item by more than a factor of 12.

Building a Serverless Webapp with Amplify and Quasar - Day 2

Mon, 22 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I was helping a customer with a Amplify App. This later turned into a meetup, where we are building a photo sorting application using AWS Amplify for the backend and Quasar for the frontend. This is the second article in a series that lets you follow along with the development process in your own time.

Building a Serverless Webapp with Amplify and Quasar - Day 1

Tue, 16 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I was helping a customer with a Amplify App. This later turned into a meetup, where we are building a photo sorting application using AWS Amplify for the backend and Quasar for the frontend. This is the first article in a series that lets you follow along with the development process in your own time.

Modelling a product catalog in DynamoDB

Tue, 09 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Data modelling in NoSQL databases is different from what we’re used to in the relational world. In this article we’ll talk about the process of data modelling in DynamoDB, single-table design and how to build a basic data access layer using python. We’ll explore these concepts by building a product catalog for a simple webshop that supports different query patterns and basic inventory management.

DynamoDB in 15 minutes

Tue, 02 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In this post I’ll introduce DynamoDB, a very powerful fully managed NoSQL wide-column data store in AWS. We will talk about data structures, the APIs to read and write data, indexes, as well as performance and cost considerations. In the end you will gain a solid understanding of the basics, which will serve as a starting point for further research.

How boto3 impacts the cold start times of your Lambda functions

Mon, 08 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Many Lambda functions are written in Python and use the AWS SDK boto3. Initializing your first boto3 client or resource can take a long time after a Lambda cold start. In this article we explore how much exactly and why it’s up to 10x faster on Lambdas with more memory.

Analyzing CloudWatch Costs

Tue, 02 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Amazon CloudWatch is a managed service for storing, visualizing and analyzing logs and metrics data of applications and AWS infrastructure. The service is simple to configure and use and is priced based on usage. Thus, adoption is generally both easy and cheap compared to other tools such as Splunk, ElasticSearch, Datadog, and all the others out there. Upon heavy usage, it can become quite expensive though. This post summarizes some common cost drivers in CloudWatch and proposes strategies to identify these and reduce their costs.

Online Lehren und Lernen ein Erfahrungsaustausch mit Lehrenden und der AWS Usergroup Hannover Di 2. März 2021 15:00 - ca. 18:00

Fri, 29 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Online Lehren und Lernen - ein Erfahrungsaustausch mit Lehrenden und der AWS Usergroup Hannover

Nicht nur für AWS Interessierte, sondern für alle Lehrenden und Netzwerkenden, die von persönlichem Kontakt zu Online Veranstaltungen umstellen mussten.

(Prevent) Hacking into a CloudService - About security, ECS and terraform AWS UserGroup Hannover Online Meetup Feb, 4th 2021

Thu, 28 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Yoni: Oftentimes, when we think about protecting resources in the cloud, we immediately think about the typical ways in - via public-facing applications or abuse of credentials. In this talk, we will look at one additional way: through the work unit parameters of a service. During the development of Indeni’s Cloudrail SaaS product, Yoni was responsible for trying to find ways to hack into the service. One of the ways he found, raises questions about how secure ECS workloads really are.

Hands on: Migrating from PostgreSQL to MySQL with the AWS Database Migration Service (DMS)

Thu, 28 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Database migrations can be a complex and time consuming task. This is particularly true for heterogeneous database migrations. Today we will see how the AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) can be a life saver for both homogeneous and heterogeneous migrations.

Why I had to update my mental model of DynamoDB streams

Tue, 26 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In a recent training I learned something about DynamoDB streams that surprised me. I had expected that any PutItem, UpdateItem or DeleteItem API call would cause a record to appear in the stream of my table, but that’s not the case. The stream works a little different from what I expected and in this short article I’m going to explain to you how.

Cross Account Resource Access - Invalid Principal in Policy

Thu, 21 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Keeping accounts decoupled is important in cross account scenarios. Setting permissions in the wrong way can lead to unwanted behavior. Better avoid setting a principal in a resource policy to a specific ARN as it may lead to ‘Invalid Principal’-errors. Using conditions provides you a more reliable and least privileged architecture.

New Year, New Design

Fri, 08 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

A new year is always an opportunity to start fresh and that’s why we’ve decided to update the design of aws-blog.de this year. Patrick has been hard at work on the design for a while and we’re excited to show it off.

Reliable Data Streaming on AWS

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Reliable Data Streaming on AWS

We should agree that in our digital world streaming and especially data streaming becomes more and more important if it isn’t already. Besides performance/throughput and security for a data streaming system reliability is a major point to be considered.

Using CloudFormation Modules for Serverless Standard Architecture

Thu, 10 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Serverless - a Use Case for CloudFormation Modules?

Let´s agree to “infrastructure as code” is a good thing. The next question is: What framework do you use? To compare the frameworks, we have the tRick-benchmark repository, where we model infrastructure with different frameworks.

Here is a walk through how to use CloudFormation Modules. This should help you to compare the different frameworks.

Jump to the Cloud - Migration Immersion Day

Sat, 28 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Der Sprung in die Cloud - unterstützt durch unsere Migrationserfahrung.

In diesem Video beschreiben wir den Weg zu erfolgreichen Migrationen in Richtung AWS. Wir geben einen Überblick über die Phasen des Migrationsprozesses:

Assess
Mobilize
Migration & Modernization

Dabei konzentrieren wir uns auf die gemeinsamen Herausforderungen im Migrationsprozess und deren Bewältigung. Darüber hinaus zeigen wir Werkzeuge und Methoden, die Ihnen helfen können, schneller zu migrieren und Sie in jeder Phase dieses Prozesses zu unterstützen.

Die Aufzeichnung ist in deutscher Sprache.

Speaker: Andreas Tschauner und Gernot Glawe

Das Lab wird in einem separatem Video gezeigt. Die Fragerunde ist nicht Bestandteil des Videos.

People perspective of cloud transformation

Mon, 23 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The underestimated factor

The underestimated human factor in migrations to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

You want to migrate (your IT) to the Cloud! This is not only a complex technical task.

Let’s call it “SoftSkills”, “peopleware”, “social systems” - it’s all about people. Their thoughts, feelings and the resulting behaviour make a migration a success. Or not.

AWS Migration best practices - Agile vs. Waterfall?

Thu, 19 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Changes ahead

The industry has changed a lot over the years, and we have seen in particular massive progress with endless resources that have failed to succeed. There is an abundance set of tools, of methodologies, tons of documented experiences but yet fundamentally the needle has not shifted. But how can this be? Shouldn’t we be much smarter in managing programs with all the tools and methodologies in hand? From V model, Prince 2, to Agile, to … ?

Test driven development with AWS and golang

Sun, 08 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Why Go?

Go(lang) is a fast strongly typed language, which is a good fit for AWS lambda and other backend purposes. I am going to highlight some nice go features. Usually this leads to heated discussions about the “best” programming language…

Consistent Style Across Editors

Tue, 03 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Consistent Style Across Editors

Sometimes, common themes occur if working on a project with multiple people and different development environments. One of the unexpected, time-consuming problems is related to editor configurations.

But it is pretty easy to unify things, if you know where to look…

Air-Gapped Compliance Scans with InSpec

Fri, 30 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Chef InSpec offers the possibility to scan any type of device using community-authored compliance profiles. As InSpec needs to connect to the machines, networking and firewall rules make this task tricky in bigger environments.

With the newly released train-awsssm plugin, this situation changes drastically. Read on, if you want to know how.

Deploying Custom Ohai Plugins

Mon, 26 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

With the deprecation of the ohai cookbook, there is some confusion on how to deploy custom Ohai plugins.

This short summary shows, how easy deployments have become.

How to deploy XWiki on AWS with One Click

Wed, 21 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Deploy your selfhosted serverless XWiki now! There are many ways to get your own, truly private and selfhosted, wiki in the exciting cloud computing times. SaaS solutions exists and many OpenSource Software can be hosted on virtual machines or even hardware. But what is the best way to deploy such Wiki on your AWS Account? This blog post shows you how to operate a deployment of XWiki without harming any servers.

AWS Certification Challenge - jetzt den CloudPractitioner machen!

Fri, 09 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Get certified challenge - Ein Meetup der AWS User Group Hannover Wir haben uns entschieden, die User Group in Hannover wieder in deutscher Sprache zu halten. Daher dieser Post auch in Deutsch. The orga team of the AWS User Group Hannover (Malte&Me) decided to get back to german language in the user group, so this post is in german. Einladung Einstieg in die Zertifizierung zum AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner: Wie geht das, Tipps, wie lernt man….

Start Guessing Capacity - Benchmark EC2 Instances

Fri, 09 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Stop guessing capacity! - Start calculating. If you migrate an older server to the AWS Cloud using EC2 instances, the prefered way is to start with a good guess and then rightsize with CloudWatch metric data. But sometimes you’ve got no clue, where to start. And: Did you think all AWS vCPUs are created equal? No, not at all. The compute power of different instance types is - yes - different.

Speed up Docker Image Building with the CDK

Tue, 06 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

When building docker images with the CDK you might notice increasing build times on subsequent invocations of cdk synth. Depending on your setup, there might be a simple solution to that problem - using a .dockerignore file. In this post I’m going to briefly explain how and why that’s useful and may help you.

Enforcing encryption standards on S3-objects

Fri, 11 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Encrypting objects at rest is a best practice when working with S3. Enforcing this with policies is not as trivial as you may think. There are subtle issues with default encryption, which may result in compliance risks. We’re going to investigate these issues and show you how to solve them.

Deployment Issues with Cross Stack Dependencies and the CDK

Fri, 04 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In this blog post I explain to you how to handle a particular class of errors with cross stack dependencies in the CLoud Development Kit.

Mocking data in Test Kitchen (Part 2)

Fri, 14 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Going beyond the easier use case of mocking attributes and databags, we sometimes want to fake some data about the system itself.

Mocking data in Test Kitchen

Fri, 07 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The more complex your cookbooks, the bigger the need to supply some external information to your test machines. Passing specific attributes, values of databags or secrets for testing become necessary. We will go through these use cases and show how to mock the data in this post.

CDK Speedster - fast Lambda deployment

Thu, 23 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

CDK is great for serverless architectures. But the deploy times even for small lambda functions is to slow.

Here is a little trick which can speed up things a lot. A small caveat: It is cheating.

The CDK pipeline construct

Sun, 12 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Generation of Infrastructure-as-Code is fun. To be the real DevOps hero, you should build a complete CI-CD pipeline. But this is a piece of work. And if you want to deploy to multiple accounts, it gets tricky. With the new CDK, builtin pipeline Construct, it’s easy - if you solve a few problems. Here is a complete walk-through.

Spice up your Cloudformation Development life

Mon, 29 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Pure CloudFormation coding only with vi can be hard work. But since CloudFormation still is the lingua franca of AWS infrastructure as code, the ecosystem keeps evolving. Even if you only use it indirectly, there are some tools to spice up your development. Hot diagrams, more aroma with compliance checks or bittersweet automated testing. Ready to taste it? Here we go.

Update your Style in Test Kitchen

Wed, 24 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

It is surprising how many resources on the Internet are carrying on outdated or deprecated information - the Chef ecosystem is no exception to this. While outdated style in Ruby files has been detected via cookstyle for a while, Test Kitchen files still have no sanity checks yet.

Let’s see what changed in this short post.

AWS Setup: Secure Identity Foundation with Terraform

Mon, 22 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

AWS Setup: Secure Identity Foundation with Terraform When it comes to access management in AWS, often I see a basic setup, with Users in IAM, as described here. Clearly, most people focus on building actual running applications, at first. After the first running POCs, the next migrations are on the road map; your architecture evolves, but the initial IAM setup stays. So it’s better to have a super secure set-up right from the beginning.

The State of Target Mode in 2020

Tue, 16 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The State of Target Mode in 2020

After my blog series on the agentless use of Chef dubbed “Target Mode” between August and October 2019, it is time to review what happened since.

Updated 14th October 2020

S3 Cross Account Adventures

Mon, 15 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Update October 2020 AWS has finally added a feature to solve our problem, now all that’s missing is CloudFormation support :-) Amazon S3 Object Ownership is available to enable bucket owners to automatically assume ownership of objects uploaded to their buckets In the process of building a data lake in a multi-account environment, we encountered a problem that didn’t fit into our existing mental model of how S3 and S3 cross account permissions work.

Bridging the terraform - CloudFormation gap

Mon, 08 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

CloudFormation does not cover all AWS Resource types. Terraform does a better job in covering resource types just in time. So if you want to use a resource type which CloudFormation does not support yet, but you want to use CloudFormation, you have to build a Custom Resource with an own Lambda Function. CDK to the rescue: use AwsCustomResource.

tecRacer is Chef Partner of the Year Financial Services

Wed, 03 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

ChefConf Online started this year with a big announcement for us. We have received the Chef Hartman award as “Partner of the year Financial Services”! This special award goes to companies that drove successful customer outcomes, developed special solution expertise and leveraged Chef’s GTM to drive growth. It makes us proud to be part of the whole Chef world. Thank you Chef, thank you Barry for this award!

Building a static website with Hugo and the CDK

Wed, 20 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Building a static website with Hugo and the CDK

If you ever wanted to host your personal website or blog on AWS this article is right for you. We’re going to build a static website with Hugo, CodeBuild and CodePipeline and host it using CloudFront and S3. We will set up everything you need to build and deploy new versions of the Website.

Testing Physical Machines with kitchen-static (Part 2)

Mon, 04 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Testing on Physical Machines - Part 2

After introducing how to work with physical machines and Test Kitchen last time, we will look at a feature to allow central orchestration of available machines.

Testing Physical Machines with kitchen-static

Tue, 28 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Testing on Physical Machines with kitchen-static

This article shows how to work with Test Kitchen on physical machines using the kitchen-static Driver. If you need to deliver a product (bundle of server and software) instead of just configuration, some tasks cannot be run on virtual machines alone but need testing on actual hardware.

Rotate your credentials and don't forget MFA

Sat, 14 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

According to the Well-Architected Framework and the least privileges principle, you should change your access keys and login password regularly. Therefore the user should have the right to edit their credentials. But only their own. Also using MFA - multi-factor authentication enhances the security even more. Therefore the user should be able to change MFA. But only their own. But how to do that? You have to combine two parts of AWS documentation. We will show you how you provide a “self-editing” group for your users with the CDK.

Building a Fargate-based container app with Cognito Authentication

Wed, 11 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In this post I’m going to show you how to use Cognito User Authentication in combination with a Docker app running in Fargate behind an Application Load Balancer and we’re going to build all this with the Cloud Development Kit (CDK).

Why would you want to use this? You’re running your web application inside a docker container and don’t want to deal with user authentication.

The declarative vs imperative Infrastructure as Code discussion is flawed

Sun, 23 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

“Infrastructure definition has to be declarative”. Let’s see where this presumption gets us. My guess why some ops guys prefer pure terraform or CloudFormation is that these languages seem to be easier to understand. There is precisely one way of creating a specific resource in the language. If you use a programming language, there are many ways to solve one specific problem. The problem which could occur later in the project is that both declarative languages have boundaries in what they can do, with a programming language you do not have these boundaries.

The case of the missing bucket notifications

Mon, 10 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The case of the missing bucket notifications A few days ago I was trying to do something quite simple. I wanted to send S3 Put-Events to multiple Lambda functions for processing. This is a pretty common pattern. To implement it you have to use an architecture such as the one you can see in the title image above. This is because S3 has a limit on the event handlers (notification targets) per event type of exactly one.

Three hurdles to skip before using the secure Instance Metadata Service V2

Wed, 15 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Do not use new Instance Metadata Service V2 (imdsv2) without proper prevention!

You may think you can use Instance Metadata Service V2 right away, but there are a few caveats: Many old modules do not work with imdsv2 yet. We look at aws cli, the Systems Manager agent and the Instance Connect service. Currently, these services will not work with imdsv2 on an EC2 instance with the latest Amazon Linux 2 image out of the box. Here you can read how to make them work!

Machine to Machine Authentication with Cognito and Serverless

Mon, 06 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction Authentication is a problem almost every IT professional has had to deal with at some point in time. Doing it right isn’t easy. What I mean by right is balancing usability and security. AWS attempts to solve this problem with AWS Cognito, which is quite nice of them, because Authentication is exactly the undifferentiated heavy lifting most customers don’t want to deal with themselves. Unfortunately authentication is still a complex topic and Cognito is an abstraction layer for it, which makes it easier, but it’s a fairly low level abstraction conceptually in that you still need to understand most of the concepts involved in order configure it correctly.

Dissecting Serverless Stacks (IV)

Fri, 29 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Dissecting Serverless Stacks (IV)

After we figured out how to implement a sls command line option to switch between the usual behaviour and a way to conditionally omit IAM in our deployments, we will get deeper into it and build a small hack on how we could hand over all artefacts of our project to somebody who does not even know SLS at all.

R can not be pushed in Production - deprecated!

Wed, 27 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Running Shiny on Fargate Some guys still thinking R cannot be used at scale or only in a limited way. I still do not understand the reason why people are like this. Since my last post about AWS Batch, which is a Docker-based service within AWS, which enables you to work with R, I spend a lot of time with Fargate, another Docker-based service on AWS. This time my boss wanted a BI app.

Dissecting Serverless Stacks (III)

Fri, 22 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Dissecting Serverless Stacks (III)

The third post of this series showed how to make IAM statements an external file, so we can deploy that one but still work with the sls command. It still involved commenting out things in the configuration, so this post will show how to solve that issue.

AWS UserGroup Hannover AWS News September und Oktober

Thu, 21 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

AWS News 25.9.19 - 21.11.19 Zu Anfang der Usergroup sprechen wir über die AWS News und ein paar Trainingsnews. Unser Service: Alle News, die von unserem Sponsor tecRacer bzw. den Consultants als wichtiger benannt wurden sind unter “Noteworthy” zu finden. Dann haben wir ein paar sehr interessante neue Trainings und ca 500 Zeilen geballte News! Noteworthy Wir stellen vor: AWS IQ Vorstellung von NoSQL Workbench für Amazon DynamoDB – jetzt als Vorversion

Dissecting Serverless Stacks (II)

Fri, 15 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Dissecting Serverless Stacks (II)

With the output of the last post of this series, we established the base to be able to deliver a Serverless application independent of its needed IAM privileges. So let’s see how this will work out.

Installationen für Alexa live Coding - Durchblick bei der neuen Alexa Presentation Language

Tue, 12 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Alexa live coding Installations The AWS Usergroup Hannover meets on 21. of November at tecRacer. Details on the meetup website of the event Das Treffen wird in deutsch stattfinden! Um life mitzumachen, müssen ein paar Tools installiert werden. Ein twitch stream zur Installation und später das Treffen seht ihr in den twitch clips: hier Streaming starts twitch.tv/tecracerDas Streaming beginn 19:00 Zeitzone Europe/Berlin unter twitch.tv/tecracer Node, npm See Website Test node --version ASK Alexa Skills kit cli

Dissecting Serverless Stacks (I)

Fri, 08 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Dissecting Serverless Stacks (I)

This post establishes the base for a small series on how to create Serverless based Lambdas which can be deployed in environments without IAM privileges or where the sls command cannot be used at all.

Instant Clones with kitchen-vcenter

Fri, 25 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Instant Clones with kitchen-vcenter

Over the last few posts we optimized our kitchen-vcenter setups and are stuck with the usual, long boot times of Windows systems. Surprisingly, VMware introduced a feature which can help us get rid of those. For good.

Guest Operations and kitchen-vcenter

Fri, 18 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Guest Operations and kitchen-vcenter

In this part of the blog series, we will look on how to speed up IP discovery of new machines with a little-known feature of the VMware Tools.

Linked Clones with kitchen-vcenter

Fri, 11 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Linked Clones with kitchen-vcenter

Quickly starting new Test Kitchen machines is one of the main concerns for getting the desired feedback cycles in cookbook development. While machines get created as a full clone by default, the kitchen-vcenter driver offers a better alternative.

Defenders - caller based EC2 security with CDK

Sat, 05 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Defenders: Caller based EC2 security The risk with security credentials is that they get exposed an are being used elsewhere. What if we could prevent that the are being used elsewhere. The idea from the article of William Bengston from netflix was: Dynamically locking credentials to the environment. This implementation of this idea is much more simple with the cdk. So, let’s defend ourselves! Our story here is the battle of the defenders (tm).

Target Mode with Serial Devices

Fri, 04 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Target Mode with Serial Devices

Usually, you will work with SSH or WinRM to connect to remote nodes and configure them. Those standard protocols bring along all the perks of a modern network connection: Encryption, Authentication, File transfers, etc

But what if you have a device without network connectivity?

Ruby Layers with Serverless

Tue, 01 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Ruby Layers with Serverless

After showing how easy it is to write AWS Lambda functions in Ruby, we will work on a way to build Layers with external dependencies or shared data in this post.

The kitchen-vcenter Driver

Fri, 27 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The kitchen-vcenter Driver

While many companies already rely on some Cloud for all of their IT systems, bigger enterprise customers often have own data centers which consist of thousands of virtual machines. Under these circumstances, it is often not desirable to only test Chef cookbooks on AWS or Azure, but doing this in the real environment is a better idea. The kitchen-vcenter driver allows you to harness the power of your own IT systems.

Ruby Lambdas with Serverless

Tue, 24 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Ruby Lambdas with Serverless

Support for Ruby was added on AWS Lambda end of November 2018, with support via the Serverless Framework landing on the same day.

The kitchen-ec2 Driver

Fri, 20 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The kitchen-ec2 Driver

Within the Chef ecosystem, Test Kitchen is one of the most useful tools. It offers the possibility to quickly test cookbooks in different OS environments on machines with a limited lifetime. That way, you can check if your fancy recipes work the same on RedHat, Centos 6 and Ubuntu. As speed is king, this fast feedback motivates more for early testing and reduces the amount of bugs found in production.

Custom Resource Diffs in Chef

Fri, 13 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Custom Resource Diffs in Chef

If you are writing custom resources regularly, you might have been annoyed by a general “diff” functionality in Chef. In this post we will work on some snippets to make this possible

Automating ACM Certificates with Serverless Framework

Fri, 06 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Automating ACM Certificate creation with the Serverless Framework Encryption is the basis for secure communication in our modern world. For most web applications this boils down to using HTTPS to encrypt traffic between the client and server. HTTPS or the underlying protocols TLS/SSL rely on Public Key Infrastructure and Encryption to establish the Authenticity of the communication partner. Authenticity in this context means that the client can be sure he is communicating with Google if they access https://google.

More Tools - CDK Examples

Fri, 06 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

We need more CDK examples

In this github repo we focus on examples for every day work. While there are some nice examples for the fancy stuff like fargate, ecs and so on in aws-cdk-examples/typescript at master · aws-samples/aws-cdk-examples · GitHub, i felt that basic examples where missing.

So we created GitHub - tecracer/cdk-templates: Templates for aws cdk

Writing Chef Target Mode Resources

Fri, 06 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Writing Chef Target Mode Resources

After my previous blog posts, you might be tempted to write your own Chef custom resources which are compatible with Target Mode.

Luckily, this is very easy - so this will be a short one.

Amazon Connect und die kleine Mailbox…

Tue, 03 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Amazon Connect und die kleine Mailbox…

Amazon Connect ist als veröffentlichter Service zwar noch relativ jung, aber definitiv nicht mehr in den Kinderschuhen. Das cloudbasierte Contact Center von Amazon etabliert sich zunehmend, was auch wir - nicht zuletzt über steigende Projektzahlen - feststellen können. Dabei besticht es unter anderem durch seine offene Plattform und hohe Integrierbarkeit.

Was fehlt - ist eine Mailbox!

Local Preprocessing in Target Mode

Fri, 30 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Local Preprocessing in Target Mode

If you ever created configuration files with any automation system, you know that this involves a lot of templating. This is actually one of the most basic tasks that Chef performs and it is done using the template resource.

With Chef’s Target Mode this currently is a bit more complicated.

Target Mode with Chef Server and Chef Automate

Fri, 23 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Target Mode with Chef Server and Chef Automate

It is not sufficient to provision remote devices via Target Mode but we also want an overview of node attributes, run history and changed resources.

In this post we have a look at how to connect agentless resources with central servers to give us the much-needed visibility.

Getting around circular CloudFormation Dependencies: S3-Event-Lambda-Role

Tue, 20 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Getting around circular CloudFormation dependencies

Several posts complain about the inability of CloudFormation to apply a Lambda event function to an S3 Bucket with an dynamically generated name.

The standard UseCase is an S3 Bucket with a Lambda event notification. In this special case the Bucket has a dynamically generated name. This cannot be done by pure CloudFormation!

How to work around this circular depency? Let me show you an easy way:

Agentless Provisioning with Chef

Fri, 16 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Agentless Provisioning with Chef

One of the main points of criticism about Chef I heard over the last few years has been the need to have an agent deployed at remote machines. Sometimes that is not desired, sometimes it is not even possible.

Due to this, configuring remote machines has become the stronghold of other tools - but a new feature of Chef changes the landscape fundamentally.

Große Wolken - CloudFormation Makros

Thu, 08 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

How to: CloudFormation Makro CloudFormation vermisst gegenüber Terraform einige Funktionen, die das Erstellen von Infrastruktur vereinfachen können. Das ist grundsätzlich korrekt, allerdings gibt es in CloudFormation die Möglichkeit, sich selber um den Einbau solcher Funktionen zu kümmern. Das geht mithilfe sogenannter CloudFormation Makros. CloudFormation Makros sind Funktionen, die wir per CloudFormation erstellen können und dann in weiteren CloudFormation Templates einbauen und verwenden können. Wir zeigen dies am Beispiel einer Count Funktion.

Deploying the Serverless Framework to AWS from Azure DevOps

Fri, 02 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction Recently I worked on a project with the Serverless Framework which I really like. I used it do define a serverless application for a customer that runs their workloads mostly on AWS but uses Azure DevOps to build and deploy resources. This came about because they were already building lots of .Net applications and are therefore used to VSTS, the former name of Azure DevOps. After recovering from the initial shock of having to use an Azure tool to deploy resources to AWS I gave it a chance (well, I didn’t really have a choice in the matter).

The serverless kingslayer? - Migration from serverless to CDK

Wed, 31 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The serverless kingslayer? - Migration from serverless to CDK Last day I have been at a customer and suggested using the CDK for Infrastructure as code. He responded with a huge yes. He has worked his way through the CDK Intro Workshop aws-cdk-examples/typescript at master · aws-samples/aws-cdk-examples · GitHub and wanted to use it. Then we discussed a lambda function. The customer was using the serverless framework - like most of the people.

Managed Services der nächsten Generation

Thu, 25 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Was ist sind Managed Services der nächsten Generation? Die Cloud-Technologie verändert die traditionellen IT-Modelle auf verschiedene Weise - von der IT-Infrastruktur bis zur Entwicklungsmethode - und hat sogar Auswirkungen auf die Unternehmenskultur. Die Einführung von Cloud-Technologie führt somit auch zu einer neuen Art von IT-Serviceanforderungen, diese werden als Managed Services der nächsten Generation bezeichnet. Traditionelle Managed Services konzentrieren sich normalerweise auf: Patch Management Change Management Incident Management Business Continuity Security Access Management…etc .

CDK - under Construction - should we use it for the next project?

Sun, 07 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Should we use CDK for the next project?

The AWS CDK (Cloud Development Kit) is great - and still in beta - so the question for the next project would be:

Should we use cdk or not?

This post will look at the state of the cdk. Also we provide our CDK Templates updated to the CDK Version 0.38 if you want to get started.

Sound of Silence - Lift your heavy Workloads to AWS Batch with Docker

Sun, 23 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Statistical Computing on Your Local Workstation Recently, a costumer told me about his problems to fullfil stastistical computing workloads on his local workstations. At first, you need to know that statistcal computing language like R and Python by default only use one core of your multi core machine. To parallize them, you have a lot of opportunities with regard to CPU-usage, IOPS etc.. Second, even if you parallize your workloads, you got an annoying loud machine in your office.

Automating Athena Queries with Python

Sun, 16 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Automating Athena Queries with Python Introduction Over the last few weeks I’ve been using Amazon Athena quite heavily. For those of you who haven’t encountered it, Athena basically lets you query data stored in various formats on S3 using SQL (under the hood it’s a managed Presto/Hive Cluster). Pricing for Athena is pretty nice as well, you pay only for the amount of data you process and that’s relatively cheap at $5 per TB when you consider the effort to set up EMR Clusters for one-time or very infrequent queries and transformations.

Chef Interactive

Fri, 07 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

As you probably are aware, Chef is a tool which is meant for automatic provisioning and configuring of systems. So if you have a particular problem falling outside of the regular use cases, both posts on the internet and support enquiries of any kind will probably result in one of two answers: “that is not possible” or “you are doing it wrong”.

But - what if you really need this for a rather exotic task or even as an transitory solution?

tRick: simple network 2 - Geschwindigkeit

Thu, 30 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Vergleich Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Frameworks - tRick

Alle Posts

Benchmark Ausführungsgeschindigkeit

Ausführungsgeschwindigkeit

Direkt aus dem tRick Repository wird mehrfach (n=10) der Zyklus Build -> Check -> Deploy -> Remove ausgeführt. Damit sollen Cache Effekte statistisch gemittelt werden. Dazu nehme ich das Tool hyperfine zur Hilfe. Es führt Kommandos automatisch mehrfach aus und mittelt die Ergebnisse.

Meine Annahme ist es, dass Terraform vorne liegt, da das Programm selber statisch kompiliert in go geschrieben ist. Außerdem geht die Ausführung direkt auf die API.

tRick: simple network 3 - Diversity (polyglott), Tooling, Fazit

Thu, 30 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Vergleich Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Frameworks - tRick Teil 3

Alle Posts

Managing multiple stages with Terraform

Wed, 29 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Managing multiple environments in Terraform Introduction I recently started learning Terraform. For those who haven’t encountered it: Terraform is in essence a framework to describe Infrastructure as code by Hashicorp. When I began doing that, I was struggling with the staging-concept of Terraform. I did my research and came upon numerous 1 articles and blogs that described ways to manage (multiple) environments or stages in Terraform2. Since I wasn’t really happy with the other solutions and there didn’t seem to be a canonical way to handle multiple environments, I decided to try and figure out my own solution.

The Same for everyone: Lambda Function and Code with the same language via AWS CDK

Sun, 26 May 2019 16:47:18 +0200

The AWS CDK has been presented on reInvent 2018. Its mission is to simplify develop infrastructure as code.

There are several other frameworks, as discussed here on the blog in tRick. So there are some competitors… Can you use shiny new CDK also for serverless lambda applications?

Big “Yes” from my side, but read for yourself…

Building Lambda with terraform

Fri, 24 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Note: An updated version of this post is available here Building Lambda Functions with Terraform Introduction Many of us use Terraform to manage our infrastructure as code. As AWS users, Lambda functions tend to be an important part of our infrastructure and its automation. Deploying - and especially building - Lambda functions with Terraform unfortunately isn’t as straightforward as I’d like. (To be fair: it’s very much debatable whether you should use Terraform for this purpose, but I’d like to do that - and if I didn’t, you wouldn’t get to read this article, so let’s continue)

tRick: simple network 1 - Abstraktion und LoC

Mon, 20 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Vergleich Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Frameworks - tRick

Ein Toolvergleich für Infrastructure as Code.

Um effektiv AWS oder generell Cloud Ressourcen zu erzeugen, verwendet man zur Erhöhung des Automatisierungsgrades “Infrastracture as Code”, d.h. die Server, Datenbanken usw. werden in einer Sprache kodiert. Dieser Vorgang wird sinvollerweise über ein Framework, welches Tools dafür zur Verfügung stellt unterstützt.

Aber für welches Tool/Framework entscheidet man sich?

Hier werden wir mit Dimensionen für den tRick Benchmark Entscheidungshilfen geben.

Serverless Blog Migration

Fri, 17 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Heute haben wir den aws-blog.de auf serverless migriert. Dabei haben wir Geschwindigkeit und Stabilität gewonnen!

Lambda - breaking Update - testen Sie ihre Lambdas mit binären Bibliotheken jetzt auf Kompatibilität!

Wed, 15 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Lambda - breaking Update - testen Sie Lambda mit binären Bibliotheken jetzt auf Kompatibilität! AWS hat gestern am 14.Mai angekündigt, dass die Laufzeitumgebung von Lambda aktualisiert wird auf Amazon Linux AMI 2018.03. Upcoming updates to the AWS Lambda and AWS Lambda@Edge execution environment | AWS Compute Blog Das bedeutet, wenn Sie Lambda Funktionen verwenden, die mit binären Bibliotheken arbeiten, kann es sein, dass Sie diese neu kompilieren müssen. Reine Scriptsprachen und die meisten Funktionen sollten problemlos weiterlaufen.

Cloud Arbeiterbienen für die Build Pipeline - Jenkins mit dynamischen Verarbeitungsknoten über AWS Plugin

Sun, 05 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Jenkins als Build Server erfreut sich einer großen Verbreitung. Die architekturelle Frage, die sich dabei stellt ist: Wie groß lege ich den Server aus, damit er neben des Management der Build Projekte auch die Builds selber verarbeiten kann? Die einfachste Antwort darauf ist ja: AWS CodeBuild verwenden, aber wenn das nicht geht? Dann bietet das EC2-Plugin eine dynamische Lösung mit AWS Mitteln: Die Worker Knoten werden vollautomatisch dynamisch als EC2 Instanzen erzeugt und wieder abgebaut.

Wer ist der Schnellste? Überblick über AWS Ressourcen mit Polyglot Programming.

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

tl;dr - asynchrone Programmierung ist sehr viel schneller als sequentielle Aufrufe. Insofern stimmt das Pferdebild gar nicht, aber ein einzelnes Pferd sieht halt nicht so spannend aus… Außerdem bin ich selber über die Unterschiede in der Ausführungszeit überrascht… Eine Analyse am Anwendungsfall “wie bekomme ich den Überblick über AWS Resourcen über alle Regionen mit minimaler Ausführungszeit. Am Rennen nehmen teil: node, python und go. Und - um die Aufschreie der jeweiligen Fans vorwegzunehmen - es geht mehr um das Paradigma asynchron als um die Sprache. Ganz nebenbei seht ihr die AWS SDKs im Vergleich! Aber lest selbst

Chef Cookbooks und Kitchen

Wed, 27 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

AWS hat Chef als Technologiepartner. Da nicht nur AWS Chef in ihren Services wie OpsWorks oder OpsWorks Chef Automate nutzt, sondern auch wir, möchte ich eine kurze Einführung von Chef und Test-Kitchen geben. In diesem Teil werden wir feststellen, wie schnell es geht, ein Testsystem mit den richtigen Mitteln zu erstellen. Im nächsten Teil werden wir das Ganze noch weiter verfeinern. Chef Cookbooks und Kitchen Warum Chef und was hat das mit AWS zu tun?

Spot the difference: Schnelle Ressourcenübersicht

Wed, 27 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Lambda: Node 6.10 End of Lifetime - welche Funktionen sind betroffen?

Heute kam eine Abkündigung für die Unterstützung von node 6.10 per Mail von AWS.

“AWS Lambda: Node.js 6.10 will soon be EOL, please migrate your functions to a newer runtime version [AWS Account: 123456789012] "

Da stellt sich mir doch die Frage: “Was ist die effektivste Methode die Runtime von Lambda Ressourcen herauszufinden?”

Dazu will ich mal ein paar Methoden vorstellen. Es sind auch ein paar (noch) unbekannte dabei… Aber lest selbst

Die 300er Marke geknackt - die AWS Usergroup Hannover hat jetzt 302 Mitglieder!

Wed, 06 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

tecRacer sponsort die AWS Usergroup Hannover unter anderem mit Räumen, Brötchen und viel Know How… Jetzt freuen wir uns über 300+ Mitglieder. Das nächste Treffen ist am 20. März und bringt Euch Malte Gesichtserkennung mit AI näher . Näheres unter: Meetup-AWS Usergroup Hannover Dieses MeetUp umreißt einerseits den AWS Stack zum Thema AI. Andererseits wird eine Demo gezeigt, die das Convolutionale Neuronale Netz (CNN) von AWS Rekognition einsetzt. Über Node-RED, einen RaspberryPi sowie eine Webcam kann per API-Call eine Beschreibung einer Aufnahme erfolgen.

Mit allen verbunden Teil 2

Sun, 06 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Infrastrukturtest des Transit Gateway mit kitchen und Inspec Transit Gateway (What is a Transit Gateway? – Amazon Virtual Private Cloud) ist ein neuer AWS Service, der VPC Peering komplett ablösen kann. Zusätzlich kann damit auch ein „transitives" Peering gebaut werden. Das heißt, anders als bei einer VPC Peering Verbindung, die immer nur zwei VPCs miteinander verbindet, werden hier alle Netze miteinander verbunden. Das lohnt es sich genau zu testen! Diesen Test will ich hier möglichst vollautomatisiert aufbauen.

Mit allen verbunden Teil 1

Thu, 20 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Test Transit Gateway mit CloudFormation/taskCat (Teil 1) und kitchen/Inspec (Teil 2) Zu Teil 2 Test Transit Gateway mit taskCat und Inspec Transit Gateway What is a Transit Gateway? - Amazon Virtual Private Cloud ist ein neuer AWS Service, der VPC Peering komplett ablösen kann. Zusätzlich kann damit auch ein “transitives” Peering gebaut werden. Das heißt, anders als bei einer VPC Peering Verbindung, die immer nur zwei VPCs miteinander verbindet, werden hier alle Netze miteinander verbunden.

tecRacer hat die AWS DevOps Competency

Thu, 29 Nov 2018 15:12:05 +0000

tecRacer hat aufgrund eines erfolgreichen AWS-Audits am 23.11.2018 die AWS DevOps Competency verliehen bekommen. Damit würdigt AWS unsere Erfahrungen, das Know-How sowie unsere vorgehensweise bei AWS DevOps Projekten.

Erste Einblicke in CloudWatch Logs Insights

Thu, 29 Nov 2018 10:51:20 +0000

Mal unter uns - in der Analyse der Logdateien hat CloudWatch logs bisher nicht gerade geglänzt. Das Feld wurde eher anderen Kandidaten überlassen. Jetzt hat man die Analysefähigkeit aufpoliert. Daher ist es Zeit sich das genauer anzuschauen. _TL;DR : Nicht schlecht gemacht, einen Blick wert! _ Verschiedene Auswertungen von vordefinierten und eigenen Feldern, kombiniert mit einer einfache Visualisierung können schon viele Anwendungsfälle erschlagen.

Druckfrisch: Amazon Web Services in Action (Second Edition)

Tue, 02 Oct 2018 11:43:34 +0000

Die erste Version von Amazon Web Services in Action haben Michael und ich 2015 geschrieben und publiziert. Unser Buch wurde schnell zum Bestseller. Wir sind immer noch vom positiven Feedback unserer Leser begeistert. Vielen Dank dafür! Allerdings entwickelt sich AWS schnell weiter. Jede Woche werden neue Features angekündigt. Daher haben wir uns wieder an die Tastatur gesetzt um unser Buch zu überarbeiten und zu erweitern. Heute ist es endlich soweit! Die zweite Version unseres Buches Amazon Web Services in Action ist sowohl als “echtes” Buch sowie als eBook (PDF) verfügbar.

Das alte Terminal kann weg!

Fri, 28 Sep 2018 05:57:59 +0000

Diese Probleme tauchen manchmal bei der Arbeit mit AWS Instanzen auf: Du arbeitest mit AWS Instanzen und die Firewall lässt keine ausgehenden SSH Verbindungen zu? Die Suche nach dem richtigen Konzept für die Verwaltung von SSH Keys gestaltet sich schwierig? Es ist erforderlich, dass jeder Terminal Zugriff auf die Instanzen protokolliert wird. Der SSH Key ist so sicher verlegt, dass keiner mehr auf die Instanzen kommt. Wäre es da nicht schön, einfach über die AWS Console eine Terminal Session auf eine Instanz zu starten?

Einleitung zu tRick

Wed, 05 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Wer träumt nicht davon das Infrastructure as Code Framwork zu benutzen, das die eigenen Anforderungen bestens erfüllt? Aber wie findet man nun dieses eine richtige Framework für seinen Anwendungsfall, den “Alleskönner” oder den “Spezialisten”? Auch wir bei tecRacer haben immer wieder mit unterschiedlichsten Infrastructure as Code Frameworks zu tun. Bei unseren Projekten im AWS Umfeld steht uns eine große Zahl an möglichen Tools zur Verfügung. Aber worin genau besteht der Vorteil von Infrastructure as Code Frameworks gegenüber einer manuellen Bereitstellung von Infrastruktur-Resourcen?

CloudWatch Alarme über Slack empfangen

Tue, 07 Aug 2018 07:27:03 +0000

Ob CPU-Auslastung einer EC2-Instanzen, Fehler beim Ausführen einer Lambda-Funktion oder verfügbarer Speicherplatz einer RDS-Instanz mit Amazon CloudWatch lassen sich Ressourcen bei AWS überwachen. Dafür werden zwei Komponenten benötigt: Metriken: Eine Metrik ist ein Sammeltopf für Messwerte, die von den AWS Services automatisch befüllt werden. Alarme: Ein Alarm überprüft in regelmäßigen Abständen ob sich die Messwerte einer Metrik noch innerhalb von definierten Grenzen bewegt. Eine Übersicht über alle verfügbaren Metriken findet sich unter Metriken und Dimensionen-Referenz von Amazon CloudWatch.

Amazon SageMaker ist mehr als Machine Learning in python - er kann auch Teaching in go

Sun, 29 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Haben Sie nicht auch schon mal beim Durchlesen von Code Anleitungen gedacht, wie schön dass wäre, wenn die Anleitung und der Code zusammen ausführbar wären? Nun, genau das kann Amazon SageMaker! Amazon SageMaker unterstützt nicht nur bei der Erstellung von Code und Modellen für Machine Learning. Das “literal Programming”, also dokumentenzentrierte Programmierung kann auch mit anderen Sprachen, z.B. go/golang verwendet werden, um Code und Dokumentation als Paket zu verwenden.

Hier ein Beispiel, wie man die jupyter Notebooks mit go verwendet:

Interview: Kosten sparen mit AWS und ParkMyCloud

Mon, 04 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Im Interview mit dem US-Magazin sdxcentral.com erläutert Sven Ramuschkat, Geschäftsführer der tecRacer Group, wie es gelang, mit [AWS] und dem Online-tool parkmycloud die laufendenden Serverkosten für eine große deutsche Hausbaufirma erheblich zu reduzieren. “Der Kunde betreibt eine große Citrix-Serverfarm, mit bis zu 50 Nutzern parallel”, so Ramuschkat. Der Serververbund nutzt GPU-Instanzen, um aufwändige 3d-Modellierung zu realisieren. “Es gibt sehr hohe Ansprüche an die Rechenleistung, das verursacht natürlich gewisse Kosten”, so Ramuschkat weiter, “um diese zu reduzieren haben wir anfänglich selbst nicht benötigte Server, heruntergefahren und bei Bedarf dann wieder gestartet.

Lass Uns Freunde Sein - Neptune Als Graphdatenbank

Fri, 23 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Lass uns Freunde sein: Neptune als Graphdatenbank Der Graphendatenbankservice Neptune ist jetzt in der Preview Phase. Wir konnten erste Erfahrungen mit dem Service sammeln. Neptune unterstützt SPARQL und Apache TinkerPop Gremlin. Ich zeige hier eine Verwendung mit Gremlin. Der Service läuft erst einmal nur in Virgina.

AWSome Day Roadshow 2018

Mon, 12 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Auch in 2018 ist tecRacer wieder Sponsor und Speaker der AWSome Roadshow. Termine in Deutschland sind: Auch in 2018 ist tecRacer wieder Sponsor und Speaker der AWSome Roadshow. Termine in Deutschland sind: 10.04. Köln 11.04. Berlin 12.04. Karlsruhe 12.06. Hamburg 13.06. Stuttgart 14.06. München Anmeldung und weitere Infos hier:https://aws.amazon.com/de/events/awsomeday-dach-2018/

Link Local-Addressen bei AWS

Thu, 22 Feb 2018 09:00:52 +0000

Im sogenannten APIPA/Link Local-Bereich (siehe RFC 3927) sind auf AWS EC2-Instanzen mehrere Dienste erreichbar, von denen der Metadata Service mit Abstand der Bekannteste und Wichtigste ist.

Allerdings gibt es dort auch andere Services (siehe Post “Default DNS-Server in AWS VPCs”), die in der Dokumentation teils recht versteckt sind.

Default DNS-Server in AWS VPCs

Thu, 15 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

AWS reserviert in jedem Subnetz die dritte IP (bei einer 24er Maske also die x.x.x.2) für Ihren DNS-Server. Sobald man mit Network ACLs arbeitet, geht man daher davon aus, dass die DNS-Queries innerhalb des Subnetzes der Instanz stattfinden.

Anpassen von Konfigurationsdateien mit Ausgabewerten von CloudFormation Stacks

Sun, 21 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Bei der Migration von Anwendungen auf AWS müssen auch die Konfigurationsdateien der Anwendungen angepasst werden. Auch dabei gilt der Grundsatz “Automatisiere alles”. Doch wie kommen die Daten aus der neu auf AWS provisionierten Infrastruktur auf die Server? Hierzu ein paar Tipps zu CloudFormation und Anpassung von Konfigurationsdateien mit Shell Skripten.

AWS Re:Invent 2017 Sessions Slideshare List

Mon, 11 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Re:Invent 2017 Sessions available on Slideshare (Status Dec 11, 2017) in an Excel-File for Download. AWS-Re-Invent2017-Slideshare-Sessions

50 Mitarbeiter Zertifizierungen für AWS

Sun, 17 Sep 2017 13:10:41 +0000

Seit vielen Jahren haben darauf hin gearbeitet … jetzt die Marke von 50 Mitarbeiter Zertifizierungen für die Amazon Web Services Cloud erreicht. Insider wissen, wie schwer diese Zertifizierungen sind, so dass sich unsere Kunden darauf verlassen können, das unsere Mitarbeiter richtig Ahnung davon haben …

Clouds - einfaches Management von CloudFormation Templates

Fri, 21 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Infrastruktur als Code ist eine (Heraus)Forderung von DevOps. Die Infrastrukturbeschreibungssprache von AWS heißt CloudFormation. Hat man sich erstmal eingearbeitet, greift man immer häufiger zum Texteditor statt zur Console, um AWS Ressourcen zu erstellen. Und eh man es sich versieht, hat man eine unüberschaubare Anzahl von Cloudformation Templates. Und dann steht man vor der Aufgabe, diese zu verwalten. Hier wollen wir ein paar Möglichkeiten dafür vorstellen.

Die Deutsche Bahn geht in die AWS-Cloud

Tue, 25 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Der IT-Dienstleister der Deutschen Bahn, die DB Systel GmbH, verlagert ihr Rechenzentrum in die Amazon-Cloud … und wir von tecRacer dürfen dabei tatkräftig mit Trainings & Consulting unterstützen. Mehr dazu hier bei Heise / iX.

Call Center Service "Amazon Connect" mit Lambda Integration - Alles möglich?

Sun, 02 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Call Center Service “Amazon Connect” mit Lambda Integration Connect ist der neue Service von AWS, in dem man einfach in der Cloud ein Call Center mit eigener Rufnummer erstellen kann. Mit einer grafischen Oberfläche kann man dann mit wenig Programmierkenntnissen eigene telefonische Abläufe erstellen, Anrufe auf S3 aufzeichnen, Statistik über Cloudwatch machen usw.. Alle telefonischen Agenten können vollständig mit einem Browser und Rechner ohne Telefonanschluss arbeiten. Hier stellen wir im Beispiel, vor wie Connect mit eigenen Lambda Funktionen zusammenarbeitet.

AWS Organizations Mail bei Umstellung auf "All Features"

Tue, 14 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

AWS Organizations ist ja nun seit Ende Februar verfügbar. (siehe auch hier im AWS Blog) Wenn man einen bestehenden Consolidated Billing “Master Account” umstellen möchte auf “All Features” … damit ist gemeint auch die Möglichkeit von Service Control Policy für die Unter-Accounts … dann versendet AWS an JEDEN Unter-Account folgende Mail und braucht von jedem Unter-Account eine entsprechende Freigabe, erst danach wird der “Master Account” auf “all Features” umgestellt.

Filter mit AWS CLI - effizient und hilfreich

Mon, 13 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Das die AWS CLI ein mächtiges und sehr hilfreiches Tool für die Kontrolle und das Monitoring einer Infrastruktur in AWS ist, ist allgemein bekannt. Oft hindern die vorhandenen umfangreichen Optionen und deren korrekter Syntax zur Ermittlung des gesuchten Ergebnisses eine häufigerer Nutzung der AWS CLI im täglichen Betrieb. In diesem Artikel wird gezeigt, wie durch den Einsatz des Parameters ’–filter’ häufig wiederkehrende Fragestellungen in Zusammenhang mit EC2 Instanzen effizient beantwortet werden können.

AWSome Days 2017 mit tecRacer in Köln - München - Berlin - Hamburg - Stuttgart - Dortmund

Fri, 10 Mar 2017 15:39:52 +0000

Die Cloud Roadshow ist zurück in Deutschland - für Startups, Mittelstand und Großunternehmen. Von Ende März bis Anfang April in sechs unterschiedlichen Städten in Deutschland in Ihrer Nähe. Lernen Sie die AWS Cloud kennen und nutzen Sie jetzt die kostenfreien Weiterbildungsmöglichkeiten von Amazon Web Services. Sie lernen unsere Lösungen kennen, die u.a. die Bereiche Computing, Storage, Datenbank und Netzwerk abdecken. Melden Sie sich jetzt an, die Plätze sind begrenzt! tecRacer ist natürlich Sponsor und gestaltet den inhaltlichen Teil jeweils ab 11:00 Uhr bis zum Schluß!

Technische Details & Hintergründe zu den S3 Problemen am 28.2.2016 in Virginia

Thu, 02 Mar 2017 17:38:37 +0000

“At 9:37AM PST, an authorized S3 team member using an established playbook executed a command which was intended to remove a small number of servers for one of the S3 subsystems that is used by the S3 billing process. Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended. The servers that were inadvertently removed supported two other S3 subsystems.

Tim Cook as Fan of the Digital Concert Hall powered by AWS

Mon, 13 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

As part of his current trip to Europe, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook also visited the Berliner Philharmoniker. He was particularly interested in the Digital Concert Hall, which can be accessed via apps for iPhone, iPad and Apple TV, among others. You can find out more in our video report.

AWS Geschäftszahlen 2016

Fri, 10 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Amazon hat vor wenigen Tagen seine Geschäftszahlen für das Jahr 2016 vorgelegt und somit auch die wichtigsten Kennziffern für seine Cloud-Tochter AWS. AWS hat das Geschäftsjahr mit einem Umsatz von über 12 Milliarden Dollar abgeschlossen. Eine wirklich beeindruckende Performance! Zumal das Wachstum zwar leicht rückläufig war, aber mit 47 Prozent immer noch auf sehr hohem Niveau liegt. Nur mal zum Vergleich. Die Umsätze von VMware und NetApp zusammen genommen, entsprechen ungefähr dieser Zahl.

Welche Hardware verwendet AWS in den Rechenzentren?

Mon, 23 Jan 2017 12:36:25 +0000

Auf der AWS Re:Invent hat James Hamilton (AWS VP and Distinguished Engineer) einen hoch interessanten Vortrag darübergehalten, welche Hardware eigentlich AWS einsetzt … unbedingt sehens bzw. lesenswert!

Velocity for complex CloudFormation templates

Fri, 20 Jan 2017 13:00:00 +0000

Cloudformation as a description language With AWS CloudFormation, (almost) all AWS service can be described in a configuration language. This enables scripting of AWS infrastructure. Thus, AWS resources are well documented. The templates can also be stored and versioned in configuration systems, e.g. CodeCommit. So CloudFormation has many advantages. However, one disadvantage is that CloudFormation templates quickly become very large. What to do? Fortunately, there are several approaches to deal with the complexity.

Velocity für komplexe CloudFormation-Templates

Fri, 20 Jan 2017 13:00:00 +0000

Cloudformation als Beschreibungssprache Mit AWS CloudFormation lassen sich (fast) alle AWS Dienst in einer Konfigurationssprache beschreiben. Das ermöglicht Scripten von AWS-Infrastruktur. So sind die AWS Ressourcen gut dokumentiert. Die Templates können auch in Konfigurationssystemen abgelegt und versioniert werden, z.B. CodeCommit. CloudFormation hat also viele Vorteile. Ein Nachteil ist jedoch, dass die CloudFormation Templates schnell sehr groß werden. Was tun? Zum Glück gibt es verschiedene Ansätze, der Komplexität Herr zu werden.

Private Route53 Zone mit VPC eines anderen Accounts assoziieren

Wed, 18 Jan 2017 11:37:03 +0000

Ja, es geht, aber nur über den Umweg der AWS Command Line … Im AWS Account, wo die Route53 private Zone definiert wurde, die Hosted-Zone-ID herausfinden:

Ausgesperrt! - Vorsicht bei S3 Berechtigung per Bucket policy

Mon, 09 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

AWS S3 bietet viele Möglichkeiten, den Zugriff zu regeln S3 Buckets bieten flexible Möglichkeiten, Daten abzulegen und den Zugriff auf diese Daten zu beschränken. Dies für den öffentlichen (Internet) und internen Gebrauch. Über die normalen Berechtigungen (Permissions) lassen sich Berechtigungen ganz grob für “list” (Anzeigen), “upload/delete” (Schreiben), “view permissions” (Berechtigungen sehen) sowie “edit permission” (Berechtigungen schreiben) einstellen. Das reicht für viele Fälle, manchmal braucht man aber eine feinere Berechtigungsverwaltung, der bucket policy.

tecRacer ist nun Kryterion Testcenter für AWS Zertifierungen in Hannover

Fri, 06 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

tecRacer ist nun autorisiertes Kryterion Testing Center in Hannover. Damit können Sie nun Ihre AWS Zertifizierungen bei uns in Hannover durchführen. Ab Mitte Januar können Sie dann Test-Termine direkt über die Kryterion Website bei uns in Hannover buchen. Nachtrag 2019: Nachdem AWS die Testcenterstruktur umgestellt hat, ist tecRacer nicht mehr Testcenter.

Citrix XenApp auf AWS GPU G2 EC2-Instanzen

Mon, 02 Jan 2017 12:13:59 +0000

Im Rahmen eines Projektes haben wir eine Citrix XenApp Cluster-Installation auf AWS GPU Instanzen (G2) durchgeführt, damit der Kunde 3D-Programme entsprechend Grafik-beschleunigt nutzen kann. Natürlich musste dabei auch der ein oder andere Stolperstein beseitigt werden … siehe hierzu auch Citrix Netscaler auf AWS … Hier die einzelnen Schritte, um XenApp auf EC2 G2 GPU-Worker-Instanzen bereitzustellen … Windows 2016 / 2012 Server AMI mit GPU NVIDIA Grafikadapter K520 aus AWS Marketplace launchen (https://aws.

Citrix Netscaler auf AWS

Mon, 02 Jan 2017 11:06:58 +0000

Für ein Citrix Terminalserver-Projekt auf AWS mit GPU-Instanzen mussten wir auch einen Netscaler aufsetzen … hier kurz unsere Probleme, die uns in Summe zig-Stunden gekostet haben: verwendet wurde das Citrix Netscaler VPX BYOL (Customer licensed) Image aus dem AWS Marketplace Netscaler Network-Interfaces und AWS Public/Private Subnets wir dachten uns, es wäre eine gute Idee, die Netzwerkkarte für das Management-Interfaces des Netscalers in ein private Subnet zu legen. Dadurch wäre die Attack-Oberfläche reduziert und das Management würde dann über einen Jump/Bastian Host erfolgen.

SQLServer Optimierung auf AWS

Mon, 02 Jan 2017 10:09:15 +0000

Im Dezember haben wir im Rahmen eines Consulting-Einsatzes verschiedene SQLServer EBS-Laufwerks-Kombinationen bei einem Kunden ausprobiert, um eine optimale Performance zu erreichen. Zusammenfassung: r4.4xlarge bringt fast doppelte Performance gegen über r4.2xlarge, obwohl CPU und RAM bei beiden Instanzen nicht viel Auslastung haben … Das war eine Überraschung! Striping generell bringt fast doppelte Performance gegenüber kein Striping EBS Typ io1 mit 5000 IOPS bringen gegenüber EBS Typ GP2 bei der einen Abfrage doppelte Performance, bei den anderen 4 Abfragen teilweise fast gleiche oder nur 30 % mehr Performance bei erheblich mehr Kosten Die neuen R4 Instanzen haben übrigens DDR4 RAM, bis zu 10 Gbit Network und bis zu 12 Gbit EBS-Network Anbindung.

re:Invent 2016 Vorträge auf YouTube als CSV

Mon, 02 Jan 2017 09:29:43 +0000

Unser Kollege Uwe hat sich die Mühe gemacht, eine Liste aller re:Invent 2016 Vorträge auf YouTube als CSV-Datei mit entsprechenden Filterkriterien zusammen zustellen: Liste der re:Invent 2016 Vorträge auf YouTube als CSV

AWS Usergroup jetzt auch In Hannover

Mon, 02 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Der Einsatz von AWS bei privaten Entwicklern, Start-up-Unternehmen und weltweit operierenden Großunternehmen hat derart zugenommen, dass Entwickler nach AWS-Benutzergruppen fragen. Über Benutzergruppen können vorhandene und neue AWS-Benutzer an einer wachsenden dynamischen Community teilhaben und mit anderen Entwicklern interagieren, um Fragen zu beantworten, Ideen auszutauschen und sich über neue Services und bewährte Methoden zu informieren. Wir freuen uns daher zum 1. Meeting am 2. Februar 2017 zur AWS Usergroup in Hannover einzuladen!

Wir können nicht nur AWS sondern auch SAP Hana Cloud-Plattform

Wed, 16 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Unser tecRacer Team SolveIT entwickelt seit diesem Jahr intensiv mit der SAP Hana Cloud-Plattform Anwendungen für einen unser langjährigen Kunden. Auf der SAP TechEd konnte sich unser Team SolveIT nun unter den besten sechs Teams behaupten und gehört damit zu den Gewinnern des InnoJams 2016. Die Herausforderung bestand darin, innerhalb von 30 Stunden eine Anwendung zur Ressourcen- und Kapazitätsplanung von Lerneinrichtungen zu programmieren. Diese Aufgabe hat unser Team hervorragend gemeistert und mit Come2Class eine Lösung bereitgestellt, mit der die Abläufe an Lerneinrichtungen effizienter gestaltet werden können.

What Does it Mean to be a Next-Generation Managed Service Provider?

Mon, 08 Aug 2016 14:32:55 +0000

Neben unserem AWS Premier Consulting Partner- und Training-Partner Status ist tecRacer seit September 2015 auch auditierter AWS Managed Services Partner und wir wurden kürzlich im Rahmen der Managed Public Cloud Provider Studie von Crisp Research im Bereich Digital/Webworkloads als „Accelerator“ und damit als führender Dienstleister bewertet. (Weitere Infos dazu finden Sie hier). Da tecRacer ausschließlich Cloud-Umgebungen auf AWS managed und dies stets nach den aktuellen Best Practises von AWS durchführt sind wir somit per definitionem ein Next-Generation Managed Service Provider.

Update unserer AWS Tools Liste

Wed, 27 Jul 2016 15:37:04 +0000

Wir haben unsere AWS Tools Liste auf den neuesten Stand gebracht … hier findet ihr alles was man so braucht, von Monitoring Tools bis hin zu Backup-Tools … http://www.aws-blog.de/amazon-aws-tools/ Wenn Ihr ein Tools habt, das ihr auch für gut und wichtig haltet, schreibt doch einen Kommentar und wir werden es gerne ergänzen.

6 Tipps und Tricks für AWS Kommandozeilen Ninjas

Thu, 16 Jun 2016 05:25:30 +0000

Das AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) erlaubt es Ihnen AWS Services einfach und bequem zu verwalten. Mit dem CLI können Sie im Terminal interaktiv Aufgaben bewältigen ohne die AWS Management Console benutzen zu müssen, was einen höheren Automatisierungsgrad ermöglicht. Außerdem können Shell-Skripte mit der Hilfe des AWS CLI verwendet werden um Infrastruktur-Setups zu automatisieren. Ein Beispiel: mit einem kleinen Shell-Skript und der AWS CLI kann zum Beispiel am Ende des Boot-Prozesses einer EC2-Instanz ein EBS Volume verbunden oder ein DNS-Eintrag über Route 53 angepasst werden.

EC2 x1.32xlarge Instanzen mit 128 vCores und 1952 GB RAM

Wed, 18 May 2016 13:33:57 +0000

AWS hat heute den neuen EC2 Instanztyp x1.32xlarge vorgestellt, der auch in Frankfurt und Irland verfügbar ist. x1.32xlarge bietet 128 vCores und 1952 GB RAM … speziell für z.B. SAP HANA Workloads oder ähnliches. Der Preis pro Stunde beträgt in Frankfurt für SUSE-Linux 18,774 USD/h, für Windows 24,562 USD/h. Es gibt selbstverständlich auch schon entsprechende Rabattpläne für 1- und 3-Jahre, so dass sich der Preis bei einem 1 Jahr schon um 42% reduzieren lässt, bei 3 Jahren sogar um 72%.

tecRacer ist jetzt Trend Micro Deep Security Cloud Service Provider

Thu, 12 May 2016 12:55:05 +0000

Seit Anfang Mai ist tecRacer offizieller Trend Micro Deep Security Cloud Service Provider und verfügt über eine eigene mandantenfähige Deep Security Plattform, die wir unseren Kunden im Rahmen unseres AWS Managed Hosting oder anderen Kunden als SaaS Plattform zur Verfügung stellen. Der Vorteil für unsere Kunden ist hierbei insbesondere: das pro Server individuell gewählt werden kann, welches der Deep Security Module aktiviert werden soll und nur diese Module müssen dann entsprechend bezahlt werden das die Deep Security Module pro 100-Stunden-Block pro Monat bezahlt werden, so dass auch bei Cloud AutoScaling- oder z.

tecRacer ist bester AWS Consulting Partner des Jahres 2015

Mon, 23 Nov 2015 14:17:47 +0000

tecRacer wurde auf der diesjährigen AWS-Partner Konferenz am 17.11.2015 in München mit dem AWSome-Award 2015 in der Kategorie “Best Consulting Partner” ausgezeichnet. “Dieser ehemalige ISV hat sage und schreibe 221 so genannte “opportunities” AWS gebracht und daraus sind 55 Prozent “Partner led”-Projekte geworden. Managing Director Sven Ramuschat nahm den Preis dankend entgegen.” Awesome ist das englische Wort für eindrucksvoll, beeindruckend, ehrfurchtgebietend, überwältigend, fantastisch … http://www.channelpartner.de/a/aws-zeichnet-die-besten-partner-aus,3046836 www.channelobserver.de/artikel/aws-diskutiert-mit-seinen-top-partnern-4742/

tecRacer Vortrag bei der AWS Usergroup in Düsseldorf am 29.10.2015

Thu, 22 Oct 2015 09:53:41 +0000

Unser Gregor Püttmann wird bei der AWS Usergroup Düsseldorf am 29.10. einen Vortag über CloudFormation halten … hier die Agenda des Abends: Kai and Thomas: ‘Immutable Windows AMIs mit Packer’ Gregor ‘Infrastructure as Code mit CloudFormation’ Ort: InVision - Medienhafen, Speditionsstrasse 5, Düsseldorf Termin: Donnerstag, 29. Oktober 2015 19:00 Uhr Weitere Infos und Anmeldung

tecRacer ist jetzt auditierter AWS Managed Services Provider

Fri, 11 Sep 2015 15:19:15 +0000

Amazon AWS hat die Anforderungen an AWS Managed Services Provider deutlich erhöht, in dem nun eine vor-Ort Auditierung auf eine von AWS erstellte “AWS Managed Service Program Partner Validation Checklist” durch das Unternehmen ISSI eine zwingende Voraussetzung ist. Diese “AWS Managed Service Program Partner Validation Checklist” beinhaltet mehr als 75 Checks über Themenbereiche wie Infrastructure Migration Design Capabilities, Security, Service Desk Operations and Customer Support, Service Level Agreements, etc., die alle sehr AWS-spezisch ausgerichtet sind.

Vortrag Aufbau einer DDoS-Resilient Architektur auf AWS

Wed, 10 Jun 2015 08:27:14 +0000

Wie können wir unsere Web-Systeme for DDoS Attacken bestmöglich schützen? Was sind mögliche Angriffe? Wie kann AWS effizient eingesetzt werden um diese Attacken bestmöglich abzuwehren? Auf dem AWS Meetup in München (http://www.meetup.com/de/AWS-Munich/events/219210485/) haben wir unseren Ansatz vorgestellt: https://speakerdeck.com/michaelwittig/ddos-resilient-architecture-on-aws

Vortrag Datenbank am Limit: spaltenorientiert als Ausweg

Tue, 21 Apr 2015 09:33:13 +0000

Wir alle kennen und schätzen SQL- und NoSQL-Datenbanken. Doch es gibt Anwendungsfälle, in denen diese Datenbanken an ihre Grenzen stoßen. Zum Beispiel bei der Analyse von Finanzmarktdaten. Dort müssen Zeitreihen von enormer Größe verarbeitet werden. Am 22. April 2015 hält Michael Wittig, Senior Consultant bei tecRacer, einen Vortrag auf der BigDataCon in Mainz (Link: http://bigdatacon.de/2015/sessions/datenbank-am-limit-spaltenorientiert-als-ausweg) und zeigt auf, wie spaltenorientierte Datenbanken funktionieren. Die Architektur von Tick-Data-Systeme wird beleuchtet. Der Vortrag endet mit dem Beispiel einer technischen Implementierung für Finanzmarktdaten.

Unser AWS Buch-Projekt "Amazon Web Services in Action"

Tue, 14 Apr 2015 09:34:44 +0000

Es gibt viele Wege, die einem den Einstieg in AWS erleichtern: ein AWS Training mit tecRacer, die umfangreiche Dokumentation von AWS und unzählige Artikel im Internet. Wer gerne mit einem Buch in der Hand in ein Thema einsteigt hatte es bisher aufgrund der sehr gerningen Auswahl schwer. Michael und Andreas Wittig, beide Senior Consultants bei tecRacer, wollen das ändern. Seit Januar 2015 schreiben die beiden Brüder an einem Sachbuch mit dem Titel Amazon Web Services in Action (http://manning.

tecRacer zum 3. Mal auf der re:Invent in Las Vegas

Fri, 17 Oct 2014 12:18:41 +0000

Dieses Jahr findet zum 3. Mal die jährliche Amazon Web Services Konferenz re:Invent vom 11.-14. November in Las Vegas statt. Wie in den vergangen Jahren sind auch Mitarbeiter von tecRacer vor Ort dabei … die Deutsche Community ist ja in der Vergangenheit in nur geringer Anzahl vertreten gewesen … wir würden uns über ein gemeinsames Bier vor Ort im fernen Las Vegas sehr freuen.

tecRacer wurde von AWS mit der Managed Service Provider Kompetenz ausgezeichnet

Tue, 07 Oct 2014 14:41:11 +0000

Als erster deutscher AWS Partner wurde tecRacer nun von Amazon Web Services mit der “Managed Service Provider” Kompetenz ausgezeichnet. “APN Partners who’ve attained the MSP Competency have demonstrated success in fully managing their customers’ AWS-based infrastructure, associated databases, and applications deployed on AWS.” Damit trägt Amazon Web Services unser mehr als 2-jährigen Erfahrung beim AWS Managed Hosting unserer mehr als 30 Kunden Rechnung. http://www.aws-partner-directory.com/PartnerDirectory/PartnerDetail?Name=tecRacer

tecRacer Cloudfrühstück in Köln am 1.10.

Mon, 15 Sep 2014 17:48:43 +0000

Cloud-Frühstück informiert über den Einsatz von Amazon Web Services (AWS) Das Thema Cloud Computing ist das aktuelle Schwerpunktthema im IT-Umfeld. Amazon Web Services ist der Marktführer im B2B-Cloud-Computing und tecRacer kann Ihnen als mehrjähriger Amazon Web Services-Partner folgende Vorteile sichern: IT-Kosten reduzieren sämtliche Ressourcen On-Demand wesentlich höhere Flexibilität in Ihren IT-Projekten nur aktuelle Nutzung bezahlen Um Ihre **persönlichen Vorteile und möglichen Einsatzszenarien von Amazon Web Services ** kennenzulernen, laden wir Sie am 1 Oktober 2014 zu unserem kostenlosen “Cloudfrühstück” im Mediapark Köln ein.

tecRacer jetzt auch in Duisburg

Fri, 01 Aug 2014 16:09:43 +0000

tecRacer hat seit 1. August auch ein Büro in Duisburg Gregor Püttmann (ehemals CIO der GAGFHAH Group und Datawarehouse Consultant bei KPMG/BearingPoint) leitet als Managing Partner unsere neue Niederlassung in Duisburg und verstärkt damit tecRacers Präsenz in der Rhein-Ruhr-Region. Püttmann verfügt über langjährige Erfahrungen bei der Integration von AWS-Infrastrukturen in die Unternehmens-IT. tecRacer wird als autorisierter Amazon Web Services Trainingspartner neben Schulungen in Hannover nun auch Termine in Köln und dem Ruhrgebiet anbieten.

Werner Vogels über tecRacer

Fri, 11 Jul 2014 10:22:08 +0000

Werner Vogels, CTO Amazon über tecRacer auf der AWS Summit 2014 in Berlin:

Verschlüsselung von Daten auf AWS S3

Fri, 13 Jun 2014 10:46:32 +0000

Verschlüsselung von Daten auf AWS S3

Fri, 13 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Das Thema Datensicherheit und damit auch Verschlüsselung ist bei unseren deutschen Amazon Web Services Kunden eigentlich ein Dauerthema. Amazon AWS trägt diesem Bedürfnis zunehmend mehr Rechnung und hat gerade gestern wieder eine entsprechende Erweiterung der S3 Dienste veröffentlicht. Hier nun eine Übersicht, über die von Amazon Web Services angebotenen Verschlüsselungsoptionen für Ihre Daten auf S3: Transparente Verschlüsselung auf Basis von Amazon AWS gemanagten Keys (bereits seit 11.2011 verfügbar): pro Datei (Objekt) auf S3 können Sie unter Properties / Details die Server Side Encryption mit AES256 manuell aktivieren.

tecRacer lädt zum AWS Cloud-Frühstück am 19.06.2014 in Hannover ein

Sat, 24 May 2014 17:44:00 +0000

tecRacer auf dem AWS Summit Berlin 2014

Thu, 15 May 2014 09:48:51 +0000

Wir sind heute ganztägig im Self Paced Lab auf dem und stehen für alle technischen Fragen rund um Amazon Web Services bereit. [caption id=“attachment_1411” align=“alignleft” width=“502”] tecRacer AWS Summit Berlin https://twitter.com/AWSSummits/status/466869366756478976

AWS EC2 Performance Probleme und deren Lösung

Tue, 06 May 2014 19:29:56 +0000

Die Firma Datadog hat ein White Paper zu den Top5-Performance-Problemen bei AWS EC2 veröffentlicht. Das 24-seitige PDF-Dokument erklärt anschaulich, wie man die wichtigsten Probleme erkennt, warum die Probleme auftreten und wie man sie beseitigt. Das PDF von Datadog finden Sie hier: AWS EC2 Performance Probleme und deren Lösung.

tecRacer auf dem AWS Summit Berlin 2014

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 10:50:05 +0000

tecRacer wird am 15. Mai beim AWS Summit Berlin dabei sein. Als Bronze Partner unterstützen wir die größte Veranstaltung der AWS-Cloud-Computing Gemeinde. Der AWS Summit in Berlin bietet Entwicklern, IT-Experten und Fachkräften eine Einführung in die Möglichkeiten der Amazon Web Services. Aus Vorträgen, Diskussionsrunden und Trainings werden aber auch erfahrene Cloud-Nutzer Know-How von dieser Veranstaltung mitnehmen. AWS-Kunden stellen Anwendungsszenarios und Best-Practice-Beispiele vor, AWS-Entwickler stehen für Fragen zur Verfügung. Treffen Sie tecRacer beim AWS Summit Berlin Auch tecRacer wird mit einem Stand auf der Ausstellung vertreten sein.

und mal wieder eine Amazon AWS Preissenkung

Tue, 21 Jan 2014 17:11:34 +0000

So fängt der Tag gut an … Amazon Web Services senkt zum 1.2.2014 die Preise von EBS-Standard-Storage um 50% und von S3 um 11% … Einer unserer Kunden spart damit ca. 1000 EUR pro Monat … wow.

wichtiger als das NSA-Thema ist eigentlich die Zukunftsfähigkeit des Cloud-Anbieters

Thu, 26 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Wenn man mit Deutschen über das Thema Cloud redet, kommt nach spätestens 2 Minuten das Thema NSA … so unglücklich dieses Thema für uns alle momentan ist, aus Unternehmenssicht ist eigentlich die zukunftssichere Wahl des Cloud Anbieters noch viel wichtiger …. Zur Zeit gibt es zahlreiche Cloud-Anbieter auf dem Markt … und naturgemäß werden sich viele davon wieder aus dem Markt verabschieden, wenn diverse Businesspläne nicht wie erwartet funktionieren. Aktuell hat sich gerade die Firma Nirvanix (US-Anbieter für Enterprise Cloud-Storage) aus dem Markt verabschiedet.

The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Public Cloud Platforms, Q2 2013

Thu, 19 Sep 2013 09:59:17 +0000

Gute aktuelle Analyse der Public Cloud Plattformen von Forrester, bei der natürlich Amazon Web Services auch sehr gut bewertet wird.

tecRacer ist Amazon AWS Authorized Training Partner

Fri, 13 Sep 2013 16:32:10 +0000

Es ist vollbracht. Seit heute sind wir offizieller Amazon AWS Authorized Training Partner … und bieten damit Trainings durch von Amazon AWS autorisierte und qualifizierte Trainer basierend auf den Original-Schulungsunterlagen an. Infos zu Kursen und Terminen finden Sie hier: http://tecracer-aws-training.eventbrite.de/

Werner Vogels (CTO Amazon) auf dem tecRacer Stand

Fri, 13 Sep 2013 16:26:34 +0000

Gemeinsam mit Amazon AWS waren wir auf auf der langen Nacht der Startups am 7. September 2013 in Berlin (http://www.startupnight.de). Amazon AWS hatte extra Werner Vogels, CTO Amazon, aus Seattle für eine Diskussionsrunde mit dem Telekom CFO einfliegen lassen. Diese Gelegenheit haben wir gleich genutzt und konnten Werner Vogels zu einem kleinen Erinnerungsfoto auf dem tecRacer Stand überreden.

Teil 3: NSA sichere Passwörter für AES-256 Bit Verschlüsselung

Tue, 02 Jul 2013 08:45:26 +0000

Die ganze Verschlüsselung mit AES-256 ist natürlich nur so gut, wie das gewählte Passwort … denn die Tools zum Knacken von Passwörten sind richtig gut und wenn man viel Rechenpower mit GPU’s hat, sind manche Passwörter sehr schnell erraten. Im Wesentlichen kommt es auf die Entropie des Passwortes an und nicht auf das Verwenden von gängigen Sonderzeichen etc.

Teil 2: NSA sichere Amazon AWS Ressourcen

Mon, 01 Jul 2013 16:41:37 +0000

Amazon AWS stellt als Speicher-Ressourcen unter anderem folgende Dienste zur Verfügung:

S3 als allgemeinen Multi-Redundanten Speicherdienst für Dateien
EBS als Dienst, der virtuelle Laufwerke für Windows oder Linux EC2-Instanzen bereitstellt

Es existieren zur Zeit drei gute Tools um EC2-Instanzen und deren EBS Laufwerke und teilweise auch S3-Dateien komplett zu verschlüsseln:

Teil 1: NSA sichere Cloud für Endconsumer Dienste wie Dropbox, etc.

Mon, 01 Jul 2013 16:04:22 +0000

Leider mussten wir in der letzten Zeit erfahren, dass die NSA und andere Geheimdienste doch mehr Daten mitlesen als wir alle dachten. Wer dieses verhindern möchte, kann selbst tätig werden und seine Daten entsprechend verschlüsseln. Es existieren bereits zahlreiche Tools auf dem Markt, die alle AES 256 unterstützen, damit ist man, sofern man einen guten Key verwendet hat, eigentlich 100% auf der sicheren Seite. Tools für CloudDrives wie DropBox, SkyDrive, GoogleDrive, etc:

tecRacer ist nun Amazon AWS Advanced Consulting Partner

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 09:22:52 +0000

Heute mal in eigener Sache: Seit gestern ist tecRacer von Amazon Web Services zum Advanced Consulting Partner ernannt wurden.

Amazon AWS Datapipe ist da ...

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 11:31:25 +0000

Seit heute ist die Amazon AWS Datapipe verfügbar. Zunächst nur in der Region US-EAST1 … aber wie immer wird das nicht lange dauern, bis das hoffentlich auch in der Region EU1 verfügbar ist. Mit der neuen Amazon AWS Datapipe kann man sehr einfach Daten-Kopierprozesse oder Daten-Transformationen designen und Zeit gesteuert ablaufen lassen. Die Preisgestaltung sieht auch prima aus:

Amazon AWS Services mit BETA Status

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 15:14:59 +0000

Folgende Amazon AWS Services werden von Amazon AWS mit dem Vermerk BETA gelistet … Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) Amazon DynamoDB Amazon AWS Elasticache Amazon CloudSearch Amazon SWF (Simple WorkFlow Service) Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) Amazon SNS (Simple Notification Services) Amazon Elastic Beanstalk … der Zusatz Beta ist wirklich unglücklich gewählt, denn viele Kunden assoziieren damit einen unfertigen instabilen Service … Amazon AWS meint mit BETA bei den o.g. Services nicht instabil sondern nur noch nicht Feature Complete aus Sicht von Amazon AWS … somit können und sollen definitiv alle Beta Services in Produktion genutzt werden.

Amazon AWS Developer Konferenz re:Invent in Las Vegas

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 10:36:28 +0000

Vom 27. bis 29. November findet zum ersten mal eine Amazon AWS Developer Konferenz statt und Sie ist schon ausgebucht … wir von tecRacer fahren da auch hin und freuen uns riesig … und wir werden auf diesem Blog detailliert davon berichten … es wäre schön wenn ich dort auch den einen oder anderen deutschen da Treffen würde …

Webinare in Zusammenarbeit mit Amazon AWS Deutschland

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 15:35:57 +0000

In den kommenden Wochen werden wir zahlreiche deutschsprachige Webinare in Zusammenarbeit mit Amazon AWS Deutschland durchführen. Termine und Inhalte sind nachfolgende beschrieben: Keine Anmeldung mehr möglich Datum: Dienstag, den 30.10.2012, 11.00 Uhr bis 11:30 Uhr Zusammenfassung: Die Amazon Cloud besteht aus mehr als 22 unterschiedlichen Services … von virtuellen Instanzen auf Basis von EC2 bis hin zu dem neuesten Speicherdienst Glacier. Im Rahmen dieses Webinars erhalten Sie einen Gesamtüberblick über die Amazon Cloud, so dass Sie die Vorteile und den Nutzen für Ihr Unternehmen einschätzen können.

10 Tipps für das Verwenden von Amazon AWS CloudFormation

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 11:42:06 +0000

Hier der Link zu einem PDF mit 10 kleinen Tipps im Umgang mit CloudFormation: 10 tips when using CloudFormation

tecRacer und Amazon AWS Enterprise Cloud Computing Roadshow 2012 ... Resumee

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 11:34:20 +0000

Puh … das war anstrengend aber auch sehr gut und erfolgreich. Gemeinsam mit Amazon Web Services hatten wir eine RoadShow in KW37 und KW38 quer durch Deutschland gemacht. Das Feedback der Teilnehmer war durchweg sehr positiv und wir konnten viele interessante Gespräche führen. Die Folien zu unserem Vortrag “Cloud Migrations-Strategien: Mein Weg in die Cloud” finden Sie hier als PDF: tecRacer Amazon-AWS-RoadShow

Video HTTP Streaming mit Flash Media Server mit CloudFront

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 11:08:53 +0000

Viele Kunden nutzen als kostenlosen Videoplayer den flashbasierten Player “Flash Media Playback” um damit das HTTP Streaming des Flash Media Servers über CloudFront zu nutzen. Leider zeigt die von Adobe veröffentlichte URL auf eine doch sehr alte Version … und diese hat zahlreiche Probleme mit dem HTTP Streaming (HDS Streaming) … es kommt zu zahlreichen Bufferproblemen …

Windows Installations-Medien für EC2 als Snapshots

Sat, 05 May 2012 14:42:55 +0000

Wenn man mit Windows-basierten EC2-Instanzen arbeitet, kann es hin und wieder vorkommen, dass man bestimmte Windows-Services nachinstallieren muss … und dann fehlt einem die DVD … Glücklicherweise hat Amazon AWS alle Windows Installations-Medien als Snapshots hinterlegt. In diesem kurzen Artikel sind die SnapShot IDs aufgelistet und erklärt, wie man die Snapshots als Laufwerk seiner EC2 Instanz hinzufügt.

Amazon AWS Cloud besteht aus 454.400 Servern ...

Sat, 05 May 2012 14:28:58 +0000

Gemäß einer Hochrechnung von Huan Liu in seinem Blog besteht die gesamte Amazon AWS Cloud Stand März 2012 aus 454.400 Servern … mit in etwa dieser Verteilung … ;-) data center\size # of server racks # of blade servers US East (Virginia) 5,030 321,920 US West (Oregon) 41 2,624 US West (N. California) 630 40,320 EU West (Ireland) 814 52,096 AP Northeast (Japan) 314 20,096 AP Southeast (Singapore) 246 15,744

Wie Instagram auf Basis von Amazon AWS skaliert ...

Thu, 03 May 2012 15:53:40 +0000

Instagram, 10 Mitarbeiter, 1 Photo-App für iOs und 1 Photo-App für Android … und eben 30+ Million User … und Facebook kaufte das alles für 1 Milliarde USD … Aber wie haben die Jungs von Instagram das Problem der stetig wachsenden Userzahlen in den Griff bekommen … Amazon EC2 … mehr hier in dieser doch sehr freakigen aber eindrucksvollen Präsentation der Instagram Gründer … http://www.businessinsider.com/instagram-cofounder-heres-how-we-scaled-into-a-billion-dollar-company-deck-2012-4

Vorteile einer VPC für den Schutz von EC2-Instanzen

Thu, 03 May 2012 11:48:54 +0000

Viele Amazon AWS Kunden nutzen ihre EC2 Instanzen ohne ein VPC … und schützen Ihre EC2 Instanzen ausschließlich über EC2-Security Groups … das ist soweit ok, aber man kann es natürlich unter Einsatz einer Amazon AWS VPC besser machen … denn durch eine Amazon AWS VPC, die übrigens nichts groß extra kostet, kann man ein höheres Maß an Sicherheit erreichen. Am besten für die meisten Anwendungsfälle ist eigentlich da Szenario bestehend aus einem Public- und einem Private-Subnet in einer VPC.

Amazon AWS Command Line Tools

Thu, 03 May 2012 10:14:40 +0000

AWS Command Line oder nicht AWS Command Line … eine oft von unseren Kunden gestellte Frage … Generell gilt erst mal folgende Faustformel: 100% der Amazon AWS Möglichkeiten über alle Module gibt es nur über das WebService API der jeweiligen Module 95% der Amazon AWS Möglichkeiten über alle Module gibt es über die Command Line der jeweiligen Module 90% der Amazon AWS Möglichkeiten über alle Module gibt es über die AWS Console Alles was EC2 und EBS oder auch VPC betrifft, kann man i.

Willkommen beim AWS Blog

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 14:59:00 +0000

Um unsere langjährigen Erfahrungen und Wissen rund um das Thema Amazon AWS und Cloud Computing zu teilen haben wir heute dieses technisch orientierte Blog gestartet …