Let’s be honest, for most developers getting their software written and working on their own machine and maybe a test environment is the main priority. Deploying to production? Ah, that’s another team. All the AWS network ‘stuff’ – VPCs, subnets, gateways? Someone else’s business, right? Secondary to the contents of the holy Docker image and […]
Deploy your own production-ready Jenkins in AWS ECS
Deploying a continuous integration service such as Jenkins is an important step when kicking off your development project. In this article you’ll discover how to deploy Jenkins into the AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS), meaning you’ll have your own highly available Jenkins instance available to you over the internet. We’ll be following all the best […]
Prometheus service discovery for AWS ECS
Having Prometheus automatically discover your AWS ECS services makes life a lot easier since you don’t have to manage Prometheus target configurations across environments. Although Prometheus doesn’t provide it out-of-the-box, in this article you’ll discover exactly how to setup service discovery for ECS by combining a few simple tools. By the end, we’ll have a […]
AWS SNS for CloudWatch alarm email notifications
Do you want to learn how to setup email notifications to tell you about important events that happen in CloudWatch? In this article you’ll discover how to setup the AWS Simple Notification Service (SNS) to send you emails whenever a CloudWatch alarm gets triggered. We’ll run through a full working example, setting up the alarm […]
Shipping AWS EC2 logs to CloudWatch with the CloudWatch agent
Want to learn how to monitor EC2 logs automatically without having to manually log into servers? Well, in this article we’ll explore how to setup the CloudWatch agent on an EC2 instance to easily stream your logs to AWS. We’ll also setup a simple alarm for when the logs contain certain text that we want […]
When to use an AWS S3 VPC endpoint
What is an S3 VPC endpoint? To understand what an S3 VPC endpoint is, we first need to know what problem it solves. Imagine we want to get access to S3 from an AWS resource. In the example below, we have an EC2 instance that needs to copy a file from an S3 bucket: This […]
When to create different subnets in AWS VPCs
Configuring subnets and VPCs can be confusing when you’re setting up AWS infrastructure. There’s plenty of documentation about what subnets are, and how to create them, but not necessarily when and why you’d create them. In this article you’ll learn why you’d want to create multiple subnets in the first place. First off though, here’s […]
Recursive AWS Lambda Functions in Node.js JavaScript
AWS Lambda functions are a great way to execute short-running processes without worrying about what hardware they’re going to run on. Sometimes though, we have a requirement to execute a longer-lived process, but unfortunately AWS imposes a 15 minute execution limit. Fear not though, because in this article you’ll learn how to write recursive Node.js […]
Creating AWS CloudFormation Resources With The Service Role
1. Introduction CloudFormation is a useful tool when working with AWS to define your infrastructure as code, or at least a YAML or JSON template. These templates allow us to make almost any change imaginable within the AWS ecosystem. In this article we’ll take a look at how to practice the principle of least privilege […]
Deploying CloudFormation changes with Gradle
1. Introduction AWS CloudFormation provides a great way to write infrastructure as code, and then to deploy that using the AWS API or AWS Console. Sometimes though, we need a deploy mechanism that’s more integrated into our project. In this article, you’ll learn how to use Gradle to easily deploy CloudFormation infrastructure by just running […]