Supercharge your CloudFormation templates with Jinja2 Templating Engine

If you are working in an AWS public cloud environment chances are that you have authored a number of CloudFormation templates over the years to define your infrastructure as code. As powerful as this tool is, it has a glaring shortcoming: the templates are fairly static having no inline template expansion feature (think GCP Cloud Deployment Manager.) Due to this limitation, many teams end up copy-pasting similar templates to cater for minor differences like environment (dev, test, prod etc.)… [Keep reading] “Supercharge your CloudFormation templates with Jinja2 Templating Engine”

Enable Cost Allocation Tags to differentiate project based billing

When running in an AWS public cloud environment, many times there is a need to dissect the billing across different projects for accounting and accrual purposes. AWS provides a mechanism to aggregate related platform costs using a feature known as Cost Allocation Tags. With this feature you can designate Tags on your AWS resources to track costs on a detailed level.
From the AWS Documentation:

Activating tags for cost allocation tells AWS that the associated cost data for these tags should be made available throughout the billing pipeline.

[Keep reading] “Enable Cost Allocation Tags to differentiate project based billing”

Watching the watcher – Monitoring the EC2Config Service

EC2Config service is a nifty Windows service provided by Amazon that performs many important chores on instances based on AWS Windows Server 2003-2012 R2 AMIs. These tasks include (but are not limited to):

  • Initial start-up tasks when the instance is first started (e.g. executing the user data, setting random Administrator account password etc)
  • Display wallpaper information to the desktop background.
  • Run Sysprep and shut down the instance

More details about this service can be found at Amazon’s webpage
Another important aspect of EC2Config service is that it can be configured to send performance metrics to CloudWatch.… [Keep reading] “Watching the watcher – Monitoring the EC2Config Service”