Implementing a Break Glass Process with AWS Systems Manager

1st of March, 2018 / / No Comments

Modern day organisations rely on systems to perform critical, sometimes lifesaving tasks. As a result, a common requirement for many organisations is a break-glass process, providing the ability to bypass normal access control procedures when existing authentication mechanisms fail. The implementation of a break glass system often involves considerable effort to ensure the process is not open to malicious use and is auditable, yet simple and efficient. The good news is AWS Systems Manager (SSM) with AWS Key Management Service (KMS) can be leveraged to allow administrative users the ability to recover access to systems on-demand, without having to bake in privileged users with predefined passwords on systems.… [Keep reading] “Implementing a Break Glass Process with AWS Systems Manager”

Replacing the service desk with bots using Amazon Lex and Amazon Connect (Part 4)

23rd of January, 2018 / / No Comments

Welcome back to the final blog post in this series! In parts 1, 2 and 3, we set up an Amazon Lex bot to converse with users, receive and validate verification input, and perform a password reset. While we’ve successfully tested this functionality in the AWS console, we want to provide our users with the ability to call and talk with the bot over the phone. In this blog post, we’ll wire up Amazon Connect with our bot to provide this capability.… [Keep reading] “Replacing the service desk with bots using Amazon Lex and Amazon Connect (Part 4)”

Replacing the service desk with bots using Amazon Lex and Amazon Connect (Part 3)

9th of January, 2018 / / 1 Comment

Hopefully you’ve had the chance to follow along in parts 1 and 2 where we set up our Lex chatbot to take and validate input. In this blog, we’ll interface with our Active Directory environment to perform the password reset function. To do this, we need to create a Lambda function that will be used as the logic to fulfil the user’s intent. The Lambda function will be packaged with the python LDAP library to modify the AD password attribute for the user.… [Keep reading] “Replacing the service desk with bots using Amazon Lex and Amazon Connect (Part 3)”

Replacing the service desk with bots using Amazon Lex and Amazon Connect (Part 2)

20th of December, 2017 / / No Comments

Welcome back! Hopefully you had the chance to follow along in part 1 where we started creating our Lex chatbot. In part 2, we attempt to make the conversation more human-like and begin integrating data validation on our slots to ensure we’re getting the correct input.

Creating the Lambda initialisation and validation function

As data validation requires compute, we’ll need to start by creating an AWS Lambda function. Head over to the AWS console, then navigate to the AWS Lambda page.… [Keep reading] “Replacing the service desk with bots using Amazon Lex and Amazon Connect (Part 2)”

Replacing the service desk with bots using Amazon Lex and Amazon Connect (Part 1)

18th of December, 2017 / / No Comments

“What! Is this guy for real? Does he really think he can replace the front line of IT with pre-canned conversations?” I must admit, it’s a bold statement. The IT Service Desk has been around for years and has been the foot in the door for most of us in the IT industry. It’s the face of IT operations and plays an important role in ensuring an organisation’s staff can perform to the best of their abilities.… [Keep reading] “Replacing the service desk with bots using Amazon Lex and Amazon Connect (Part 1)”

Dynamically rename an AWS Windows host deployed via a syspreped AMI

20th of March, 2017 / / 2 Comments

One of my customers presented me with a unique problem last week. They needed to rename a Windows Server 2016 host deployed using a custom AMI without rebooting during the bootstrap process. This lack of a reboot rules out the simple option of using the PowerShell Rename-Computer Cmdlet. While there are a number of methods to do this, one option we came up with is dynamically updating the sysprep unattended answer file using a PowerShell script prior to the unattended install running during first boot of a sysprepped instance.… [Keep reading] “Dynamically rename an AWS Windows host deployed via a syspreped AMI”

Viewing AWS CloudFormation and bootstrap logs in CloudWatch

30th of August, 2016 / / No Comments

Mature cloud platforms such as AWS and Azure have simplified infrastructure provisioning with toolsets such as CloudFormation and Azure Resource Manager (ARM) to provide an easy way to create and manage a collection of related infrastructure resources. Both tool sets allow developers and system administrators to use JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) to specify resources to provision, as well as provide the means to bootstrap systems, effectively allowing for single click fully configured environment deployments.

While these toolsets are an excellent means to prevent RSI from performing repetitive monotonous tasks, the initial writing and testing of templates and scripts can be incredibly time consuming.… [Keep reading] “Viewing AWS CloudFormation and bootstrap logs in CloudWatch”

AWS CloudFormation AWS::RDS::OptionGroup Unknown option: Mirroring

17th of August, 2016 / / No Comments

Amazon recently announced Multi-AZ support for SQL Server in Sydney, which provides high availability for SQL RDS instances using SQL Server mirroring technology. In an effort to make life simpler for myself, I figured I’d write a CloudFormation template for future provisioning requests, however it wasn’t as straight forward as I’d expected.

I began by trying to guess my way through the JSON resources, based on what I’d already knew for MySQL deployments. I figured the MultiAZ property was still relevant, so I hacked together a template and attempted to provision the stack, which failed, indicating the following error:

CREATE_FAILED        |  Invalid Parameter Combination: MultiAZ property cannot be used with SQL Server DB instances, use the Mirroring option in an option group associated with the DB instance instead.… [Keep reading] “AWS CloudFormation AWS::RDS::OptionGroup Unknown option: Mirroring”

Leveraging Cloud Storage for the Enterprise: Microsoft StorSimple – Part 1

23rd of October, 2015 / / No Comments

Originally posted on Bobbie’s blog @ www.thecloudguy.info

It’s no secret that one of the biggest pain points for enterprises today is the rapid growth of unstructured data. The ability to manage, protect and archive an organisation’s most valuable assets is arguably one of the biggest strains on IT department budgets.

The advent of cloud technology has many organisations looking for a way to leverage Pay-as-You-Go cloud storage offerings to assist in the data life-cycle process. The difficulty with these offerings is that data is stored as objects rather than on file systems such as NFS and CIFS, meaning integration with existing business processes and solutions isn’t straight forward.… [Keep reading] “Leveraging Cloud Storage for the Enterprise: Microsoft StorSimple – Part 1”