AWS November Announcement Review – Part 2

4th of December, 2019 / / No Comments

In my last article (available here), I walked through a number of announcements that AWS made over the first couple of weeks in November. Continuing on from there this article covers the announcements from the second half of the month. This will hopefully set us up to tackle the wave of announcements that will come out during Re: Invent.

When we look at the announcements over the second half of November we can see a couple of recurring themes:

Developer Features

There where a number of new features that clearly make life easier for the developer community.… [Keep reading] “AWS November Announcement Review – Part 2”

November is the new Christmas – At least for fans of AWS

1st of December, 2019 / / No Comments
It’s no secret within the halls of Telstra Purple that the end of November is my favourite time of year, and as a Cloud Architect that lives in the land of AWS…. why wouldn’t this be everybody’s  favourite time of year?
Firstly, for the whole month of November Team Orange slam us with a non stop onslaught of new features and product accounements. In fact, if we have a look at the AWS What’s New page https://aws.amazon.com/new
… [Keep reading] “November is the new Christmas – At least for fans of AWS”

SSM Endpoints – A How To

29th of September, 2019 / / No Comments

AWS Simple Systems Manager (SSM or Systems Manager) is an AWS service for bulk management of EC2 instances, and on-premises servers too. Like many AWS services though, it is accessed via the internet. This means that:

  1. you need some way to access the service
  2. the control data is going out over the internet

Getting around statement a. is pretty easy, either have a direct internet connection or you can configure the SSM agent to use a proxy.  … [Keep reading] “SSM Endpoints – A How To”

AWS Data Lifecycle Manager Update

28th of June, 2019 / / No Comments

This one slipped a bit under the radar, but the other week there was a big change for people running Date Lifecycle Manager (DLM). In my colleague Matt’s weekly AWS update on May 31st, he mentioned the “snapshot across multiple EBS volumes” update. On first glance this didn’t seem to be a big deal. Yep, you can now take multi-volume snapshots in a consistent manner. As a backup person, this is good news, but not much more than a footnote.… [Keep reading] “AWS Data Lifecycle Manager Update”

Weekly AWS Update: Friday 31st May 2019

31st of May, 2019 / / No Comments

Well, it’s the end of autumn, and if the weather in Melbourne is anything to go by, winter’s here. Regardless, here we are with another weekly look at the goodies AWS have given us over the week. In this weeks update, we take a look at an extensive collection of releases from across the platform. We have more updates to EBS functionality. Amazon Connect adds additional Telephony Metadata, opening up new routing possibility. And some exciting features added to Amplify and CloudFormation.… [Keep reading] “Weekly AWS Update: Friday 31st May 2019”

Building “Dial a Joke” Part 1 – Using Lambda functions with Amazon Connect

28th of May, 2019 / / No Comments

In this article, we take a look at how to add AWS Lambda functions to our Amazon Connect Contact Flows. This will be the first in a series of articles where we build our very own “Dial A Joke” Service. That’s right, we’re going back to the ’90s using 2019 technology. Throughout this project, we will be taking a look at:

  • Adding Lambda Functions to Contact Flows for dynamic response generation
  • defining and leveraging call variables
  • Using Lambda responses to drive Contact Flow decision making and conditional logic flows
  • Implementing and triggering outbound calls from Amazon Connect
  • a basic introduction to SSML (Speech Synthesis Markup Language

If you haven’t already taken a look at Amazon Connect, you can take a look at some of our previous articles.… [Keep reading] “Building “Dial a Joke” Part 1 – Using Lambda functions with Amazon Connect”

Weekly AWS Update: Friday 24th May 2019 – Part 2

26th of May, 2019 / / No Comments

And we’re back with part 2 of our weekly update. In this, the second part of our weekly update we are taking a look at all of the RDS releases. And over the last week, there has been a lot of them. Over the last week, We’ve got an update to RDS Recommendations for Amazon Aurora. Password validation support is now available for MySQL and a bunch of performance and feature uplifts.

Each of the AWS Weekly updates we publish on this blog isn’t an exhaustive list of all the week’s updates.… [Keep reading] “Weekly AWS Update: Friday 24th May 2019 – Part 2”

Weekly AWS Update: Friday 24th May 2019 – Part 1

25th of May, 2019 / / No Comments

It’s Friday again, and that means it’s time we take another look at the releases and announcements made by AWS. Like always, we have a lot to cover this week and there are a few things everybody. In fact, there is so much to cover this week, we actually had to break it up into two separate articles. In this article, we look at the ability to add additional website authorization providers to WorkLink. We also have an update on AWS Ground Station and changes to Amazon Worklink.… [Keep reading] “Weekly AWS Update: Friday 24th May 2019 – Part 1”

Adding Call handling logic to Amazon Connect

22nd of May, 2019 / / No Comments

This is the third article in a series where we are taking a look at Amazon Connect. In this article, we will add some logic handling to our “Contact Flow” by adding a basic IVR. However, if you haven’t been following along, I highly advise you go back and review our previous articles:

  1. Getting Started with Amazon Connect – In this article, we set up a new Amazon Connect Instance by walking through the Setup Wizard
  2. Accepting our First Call using Amazon Connect – Once we’ve got our new Connect instance, we walk through the process of setting up our first contact flow

If there is a feature that you’d like to see a blog article on, post a note in the comments.… [Keep reading] “Adding Call handling logic to Amazon Connect”

Accepting our First Call using Amazon Connect

21st of May, 2019 / / No Comments

In our last article on Amazon Connect, we walked through the process of setting up a new Amazon Connect Tenant. In this article, we are going to set up a basic call flow and a Direct In Dial Number (DID) so that we can start accepting inbound phone calls. Future articles, we will be adding additionality functionality (such as Chatbots and automated scripts) to help automate some of our interactions. This article continues our series on the Amazon Connect contact center as a service.… [Keep reading] “Accepting our First Call using Amazon Connect”