AWS Starter Kit - 2020 Edition

This post was updated in July 2020. It was originally my first post on this blog in December 2016. 👴 I’m often asked by many colleagues, friends, or Twitter followers where to start with Amazon Web Services (AWS). In this post, I will try to explain where you should start in 2020. I’ll try to write this post as I wish I had in 2016 when I came into this technology....

July 10, 2020 · 4 min · 708 words · zoph

[MAMIP] Monitor AWS Managed IAM Policies

This Article was created posted in September 2019. Updated in February 2020. Disclaimer Thanks to @0xdabbad00 from SummitRoute for the original idea and jq parsing. Purpose When your production workloads rely on AWS IAM Managed Policies (don’t do this), you will need to be notified when changes occur behind the scene. It’s also interesting to monitor new AWS services releases prior announcements to get spoiled. This pet project automates the retrieval (every 4 hours) of new AWS Managed IAM Policies to make it easier to monitor and get alerted when changes occur (by AWS) using “Watch” feature from Github, RSS or dedicated Twitter Account....

February 22, 2020 · 2 min · 301 words · zoph

Easily reduce by 70% your AWS Fargate bills

Quick post today about CostSaving on AWS. As you know two of my preferred subjects on Public Cloud are: Security and FinOps ! Recently, AWS introduced a way to reduce by up to 70% AWS bills using Spot instances with AWS Fargate service. It’s really easy to use, and if your workload is interruption-proof, batch jobs, or CI/CD containers, don’t hesitate to use it to drastically reduce your workloads costs....

February 16, 2020 · 1 min · 120 words · zoph

CloudWatch Synthetics - Canary testing

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

February 2, 2020 · 4 min · 662 words · zoph

On being Independent

In December 2019, I’ve decided to switch from a long time (15 years) habits of Full-Time Employee (FTE) contracts to run my own business as an Independent AWS Cloud Architect. This decision came to me after a few deceptions from my past experiences as a traditional employee/consultant, and I was thinking about this switch for several years now. It was the perfect time for me to start this new challenge:...

January 1, 2020 · 2 min · 316 words · zoph