Getting Started with Amazon Connect

21st of May, 2019 / / No Comments

This article is the first in a series of articles where we will be taking a look at Amazon Connect. Amazon Connect is a self-service, cloud-based contact center service. This first article wakes through the steps required to get an Amazon Connect (hereby referred to simply as connect) instance up and running. Future articles will look at implementing additional features and logic and how they might be used to provide additional value.

Get Started

Getting things started is as simple as logging into your AWS account and browsing to the Connect Management console.… [Keep reading] “Getting Started with Amazon Connect”

Weekly AWS Update: Friday 17th May 2019

17th of May, 2019 / / No Comments

Well, it’s been over a month since my last AWS Weekly Update, so we’ve got quite a lot to cover in this weeks update. There have been quite a few releases over the last month that help to solve a wide array of issues and provide more functionality for cloud architects. From New AWS Lambda support to new features in the world of EC2 management. And let’s not forget one of the big announcements I’ve personally been waiting for, the Transit Gateway support for Direct Connect.… [Keep reading] “Weekly AWS Update: Friday 17th May 2019”

Introducing GraphQL API – A Historical Preview

10th of May, 2019 / / No Comments

 

Application Programming Interface, commonly known as API, is a set of functions that allow downstream applications capability to access the features or data of a black box business application. In the current age of computer applications, APIs are abundantly available and are the cornerstone of business strategies; however, the beginning of APIs consisted of confusing approaches related to documentation and implementation of the code coupled with the high code complexity. Initially, the concepts of middleware, such as CORBA and RPC, capable of some interoperability gave rise to API frameworks, such as SOAP.… [Keep reading] “Introducing GraphQL API – A Historical Preview”

Using Amazon Alexa to drive a radio-controlled car – Part 1

6th of May, 2019 / / No Comments

First published on Nivlesh’s personal blog at https://nivleshc.wordpress.com

Introduction

Over the Easter holidays, while watching my son play with his radio-controlled toy car, I had a strange thought pop into my head. Instead of using the sticks on the remote control, won’t it be cool to control the car by using just your voice? You could tell the car to move forward, backward, left or right. What if you could save all the moves you have asked the car to take so far and then at a later time, get the car to replay all those moves?… [Keep reading] “Using Amazon Alexa to drive a radio-controlled car – Part 1”

A Look at AWS Organizations’ new SCP Controls

26th of April, 2019 / / No Comments

Today I’m going to cover off a new feature that was recently announced for AWS Organizations around the use and function of Service Control Policies (SCPs). These new fine-grained controls enabled a wide range of capabilities that have previously been unavailable for customers using a multi-account setup. Previously, when setting up an SCP a user had the option of allowing and denying access to particular Actions within the AWS platform, for example denying access to delete IAM roles.… [Keep reading] “A Look at AWS Organizations’ new SCP Controls”

Using Ansible to create an inventory of your AWS resources

17th of April, 2019 / / No Comments

First published on Nivlesh’s personal blog at https://nivleshc.wordpress.com

Background

I was recently at a customer site, to perform an environment review of their AWS real-estate. As part of this engagement, I was going to do an inventory of all their AWS resources. Superficially, this sounds like an easy task, however when you consider the various regions that resources can be provisioned into, the amount of work required for a simple inventory can easily escalate.

Not being a big fan of manual work, I started to look at ways to automate this task.… [Keep reading] “Using Ansible to create an inventory of your AWS resources”

Weekly AWS Update: Friday 5th April 2019

5th of April, 2019 / / No Comments

Well, it’s been a little quiet this past week in the world of AWS updates and releases. But there are still a couple of interesting announcements to cover off in this weeks article. We have a new feature available to Fargate workloads and a price Drop for those using DynamoDB global tables. A new Search expression for CloudWatch dashboards, and new policy abilities when working with CloudWatch alarms.

As always, this list is not meant to be an exhaustive list of all the updates and changes to the AWS eco-system, but simply a summary of changes that might have an impact on the business and trends we at Kloud are seeing within the industry.… [Keep reading] “Weekly AWS Update: Friday 5th April 2019”

Weekly AWS Update: Friday 29th March 2019

28th of March, 2019 / / No Comments

Have you heard about containers?

Today is Friday, March 29th, are we are 25% of the way through the year and things are coming quick and fast in the world of Amazon Web Services. When I was going through the recent announcements in preparation for this article it was a pleasure to see that the world of containers has gotten a number of handy feature updates this week. From new pre-configured container images to testing tools and even new deployment options, it’s all happening this week.… [Keep reading] “Weekly AWS Update: Friday 29th March 2019”

Deploy VPN tunnel between Azure cloud and AWS cloud environment

28th of March, 2019 / / 1 Comment

Recently, I was working with a client who utilizes both AWS and Azure in their business and needed to establish a VPN connection across these cloud providers for certain services. This gave me the opportunity to work on establishing a VPN tunnel between the two public cloud offerings.

I would like to share the steps I used to establish the VPN (Site-to-Site) tunnel between Azure and AWS.

In the ideal world, the Azure VPN Gateway and AWS Gateway offering should have been enough to establish the VPN connection.… [Keep reading] “Deploy VPN tunnel between Azure cloud and AWS cloud environment”

Backups in AWS

27th of March, 2019 / / No Comments

In a previous blog (HERE) I discussed why backups were needed in AWS and about RPO, RTO and other TLAs. This blog will compare some of the different backup options available for your infrastructure in AWS.

Roll your own

AWS has really good options for managing your environment your way, whether this be scripts using CLIs, other software using APIs, or Lambda scripts. Managing your backup environment is no different. Lambda scripts can look for tags on your instances or volumes and create a snapshot.… [Keep reading] “Backups in AWS”