Automate your Cloud Operations Part 2: AWS CloudFormation

16th of May, 2015 / / No Comments

Stacking the AWS CloudFormation

Automate your Cloud Operations blog post Part 1 have given us the basic understanding on how to automate the AWS stack using CloudFormation.

This post will help the reader on how to layer the stack on top of the existing AWS CloudFormation stack using AWS CloudFormation instead of modifying the base template. AWS resources can be added into existing VPC using the outputs detailing the resources from the main VPC stack instead of having to modify the main template.… [Keep reading] “Automate your Cloud Operations Part 2: AWS CloudFormation”

Amazon Web Services (AWS) networking: public IP address and subnet list

8th of May, 2015 / / No Comments

Originally posted on Lucian’s blog over at Lucian.Blog.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has many data centre’s in many continents and countries all over the world. AWS has two key grouping methods of these data centres: regions and availability zones.

It can be very handy to either reference the IP address or subnet of a particular service in say a proxy server to streamline connectivity. This is a good practice to avoid unnecessary latency via proxy authentication requests. Below is an output of Amazon Web Services IP address and subnet details split into the key categories as listed by AWS via thier publishing of information through the IP address JSON file available here.

Sidebar: Click here to read up more on regions and availability zones or click here or click here. Included in these references is also information about the DNS endpoints for services that are therefore IP address agnostic. Also, If you’d like more details about the JSON file click here.

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Automate your Cloud Operations Part 1: AWS CloudFormation

29th of April, 2015 / / 3 Comments

Operations

What is Operations?

In the IT world, Operations refers to a team or department within IT which is responsible for the running of a business’ IT systems and infrastructure.

So what kind of activities this team perform on day to day basis?

Building, modifying, provisioning, updating systems, software and infrastructure to keep them available, performing and secure which ensures that users can be as productive as possible.

When moving to public cloud platforms the areas of focus for Operations are:

  • Cost reduction: if we design it properly and apply good practices when managing it (scale down / switch off)
  • Smarter operation: Use of Automation and APIs
  • Agility: faster in provisioning infrastructure or environments by Automating the everything
  • Better Uptime: Plan for failover, and design effective DR solutions more cost effectively.
… [Keep reading] “Automate your Cloud Operations Part 1: AWS CloudFormation”

Amazon Web Services vs Microsoft Azure service comparison cheat sheet

27th of April, 2015 / / 6 Comments

Originally posted on Lucian’s blog at lucian.blog.

I’m a big fan of both Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. The two clouds are redefining the way web, apps and everything on the internet is made accessible from enterprise to the average user. Both for my own benefit and for yours, here’s a detailed side by side comparison of services as well as features available in each cloud:

Cloud Service Microsoft Azure Amazon Web Services
Locations Azure Regions Global Infrastructure
  NA Availability Zones
Management Azure Portal Management Console
Azure Preview Portal NA
Powershell+Desired State Configuration Command Line Interface
Compute Services
 Cloud Services Elastic Beanstalk
Virtual Machines Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
  Batch Auto Scaling
RemoteApp Work Spaces
Web and Mobile Web Apps NA

Mobile Services Mobile SDK
API Management CloudTrail
NA Cognito
NA Mobile Analytics
Storage
 SQL Databases Relational Database Service (RDS)
DocumentDB Dynamo DB
  Redis Cache Redshift
Blob Storage Simple Storage Service (S3)
Table Storage Elastic Block Store (EBS)
Queues Simple Queue Service (SQS)
File Storage Elastic File System (EFS)
Storsimple Storage Gateway
Analytics + Big Data
 HDInsight (Hadoop) Elastic MapReduce (EMR)
Stream Analytics Kinesis
Machine Learning Machine Learning
Data Orchestration Data Factory Data Pipeline
Media Services
 Media Services Elastic Transcoder
  Visual Studio Online NA
  BizTalk Services Simple Email Service (SES)
  Backup (Recovery Services) Glacier
  CDN CloudFront
Automation Automation OpsWorks
  Scheduler CodeDeploy + CodePipeline
Service Bus Simple Workflow (SWF)
Search CloudSearch
Networking Virtual Network Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
  ExpressRoute DirectConnect
  Traffic Manager Elastic Load Balancing
  NA Route 53 (DNS)
 Management Services Resource Manager Cloud Formation
NA Trusted Adviser
Identity and Access Management
 Active Directory Directory Service
NA Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Marketplace Marketplace Marketplace
Container Support Docker VM Extensions EC2 Container Service
Compliance Trust Centre CloudHSM
Multi-factor Authentication Multi-Factor Authentication Multi-Factor Authentication
Monitoring Services Operational Insights Config
Application Insights CloudWatch
Event Hubs NA
Notification Hubs Simple Notification Service (SNS)
Key Vault Key Management Store
Government Government GovCloud
Other services Web Jobs Lambda
NA Service Catalog
Office 365 Exchange Online WorkMail
Office 365 Sharepoint Online WorkDocs

For me this comparison is an exercise to allow me to reference quickly what the major services and features are on each cloud platform.… [Keep reading] “Amazon Web Services vs Microsoft Azure service comparison cheat sheet”

Easily connect to your AWS VPC via VPN

10th of April, 2014 / / 21 Comments

This blog post will explain the process for setting up a client to site connectivity on AWS. This allows you to connect to your AWS resources from anywhere using a VPN client. There are several ways to do this but this post shows you one of the quickest ways to do it using a pre-built community image by OpenVPN available in AWS.

AWS Marketplace

AWS Marketplace is a great place to find any pre-built solutions created by AWS ISV’s or enthusiasts for a wider community benefit.… [Keep reading] “Easily connect to your AWS VPC via VPN”

Updating your AWS bootstrap

19th of August, 2013 / / 6 Comments

In Bootstrapping AWS we looked at what’s required to kick off a brand new installation with your latest build.  But it’s two weeks later now – and you’re about to release version 2 of the application.  Using the Cloud Formation script we created first, it’s actually quite easy.

In the first build script, there was a reference in the CloudFormation Metadata to the website source – being {“Ref” : “BuildNumber”}.

"Parameters" : {
  "BuildNumber" : {
  "Type" : "Number"
  }
}

So the process is as follows.… [Keep reading] “Updating your AWS bootstrap”

Bootstrapping on AWS

5th of August, 2013 / / 11 Comments

The Task

This post is going to look at the process of hosting a highly available corporate website using Windows Server 2012 Amazon Machine Image (AMI), and bootstrapping the installation of Internet Information Services (IIS), urlrewrite, and our website. We don’t need a golden image as we release software every week. We also want to make sure that it is a high availability solution, so we need to look at scaling groups and repeatability.

Our high availability solution will contain one load balancer, and a minimum of two Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances across multiple availability zones (AZ’s).  … [Keep reading] “Bootstrapping on AWS”

AWS Web Architecture 101 – Lessons Learned

24th of July, 2013 / / No Comments

This blog discusses some of the lessons learned in implementing a Web Architecture with RDS. We walk through some key elements and highlight some gotchas  to be mindful of.

Scenario

The components for this scenario include:

  • Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) with a public subnet and a private subnet.
  • ELB for  Web Traffic
  • IIS Web Server instance
  • MS SQL RDS instance
  • Jump box for management connectivity

One of the first implementation considerations in AWS is how you will setup your network.… [Keep reading] “AWS Web Architecture 101 – Lessons Learned”

ELBs do not cater for your environment? Set up HAProxy for your IIS servers

4th of July, 2013 / / 9 Comments

Recently we encountered a scenario where we needed to look for an alternative for Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) due to an existing IIS configuration used in an organisation.  We found that HAProxy was the best candidate in terms of simplicity & the suitability for scenario we were addressing.

This post will show you how you can leverage HAProxy to load balance IIS web servers hosted in AWS EC2 and explain briefly why HAProxy is best suited to address our scenario.… [Keep reading] “ELBs do not cater for your environment? Set up HAProxy for your IIS servers”

AWS Cloud Architecture Essentials – The Commodity

16th of May, 2013 / / No Comments

AWS Architectures start at the heart of many businesses, customers.

The foundation and principles of AWS have been built on Amazon, a company that was envisaged to be the most customer centric company in the world. “There are two kinds of companies, those that work to try to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be the second.” – Jeff Bezos

These types of requirements are inputs into an ethos that pervades, that underpins the Architecture of AWS.… [Keep reading] “AWS Cloud Architecture Essentials – The Commodity”