VicRoads digital transformation in the cloud and beyond

27th of November, 2018 / / No Comments

How VicRoads managed its cloud migration, improving data compliance and streamlining its digital operations.

Last year, VicRoads embarked on an ambitious project to revolutionise its existing informational website to a transactional one, offering online versions of many regular interactions, such as vehicle registration and permits.

While a big step up for the experience of Victorian motorists, from a technical perspective, this move required VicRoads to completely revisit its cloud architecture and delivery model. This would ensure new personal and financial data being gathered were stored in accordance to best practices and in compliance with government standards.… [Keep reading] “VicRoads digital transformation in the cloud and beyond”

AWS Organizations, How do I get Started?

27th of November, 2018 / / No Comments

Overview

In the previous blog post (see here) we took a look at AWS Organizations, what it is, what it’s comprised of and the benefits of a multi-account strategy. In this post we will take a look at how to get started with AWS Organizations by looking at a couple of ways we might want to design our Organization Unit’s hierarchy and go through the process of setting up our First OU’s and AWS Accounts. In a future blog post we will look at how we can implement an AWS Account Vending Machine to automate this process and ensure consistency across future accounts.… [Keep reading] “AWS Organizations, How do I get Started?”

Replacing your Secure FTP Server with Amazon Simple Storage Service

14th of October, 2018 / / 1 Comment

First published at https://nivleshc.wordpress.com

Introduction

What if I told you that you could get rid of most of your servers, however still consume the services that you rely on them for? No longer will you have to worry about ensuring the servers are up all the time, that they are regularly patched and updated. Would you be interested?

To quote Werner Vogel “No server is easier to manage than no server”.

In this blog, I will show you how you can potentially replace your secure ftp servers by using Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).… [Keep reading] “Replacing your Secure FTP Server with Amazon Simple Storage Service”

Remove/Modify Specific AWS Tags from the Environment- PowerShell

12th of September, 2018 / / 1 Comment

Why use TAGs

To help you manage your instances, images, and other Amazon EC2 resources, you can optionally assign your own metadata to each resource in the form of tags. This topic describes tags and shows you how to create them.

(Ref: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/Using_Tags.html)

Problem :

Sometimes tags are applied in environments prior to developing a tagging strategy. The problem in exponentially increased with the size of the environment and the number of users creating resources.… [Keep reading] “Remove/Modify Specific AWS Tags from the Environment- PowerShell”

Creating custom Deep Learning models with AWS SageMaker

6th of September, 2018 / / 1 Comment

S

This blog will cover how to use SageMaker, and I’ve included the code from my GitHub, https://github.com/Steve–Hunter/DeepLens-Safety-Helmet.

1 What is AWS SageMaker?

AWS (Amazon Web Services) SageMaker is “a fully managed machine learning service. With Amazon SageMaker, data scientists and developers can quickly and easily build and train machine learning models, and then directly deploy them into a production-ready hosted environment.” (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sagemaker/latest/dg/whatis.html). In other words, SageMaker gives you a one-stop-shop to get your Deep Learning models going, in a relatively friction-less way.… [Keep reading] “Creating custom Deep Learning models with AWS SageMaker”

Disk Space Reporting through Lamba Functions- Windows servers

4th of September, 2018 / / No Comments

Solution Objective:

The solution provides detailed report related to hard disk space for all the Windows Ec2 instances in the AWS environment.

Requirements:

Mentioned below are the requirements the solution should be able to fulfil.

  • Gather information related to all mount points in all the Windows EC2 instances in the environment.
  • Able to generate cumulative report based on all instances in the environment.

3. Assumptions:

The following assumptions are considered

  • All the EC2 instances have SSM agent installed.
… [Keep reading] “Disk Space Reporting through Lamba Functions- Windows servers”

Building a Serverless Application in AWS using React and Claudiajs

29th of August, 2018 / / No Comments

With the introduction of Function as a Service capabilities in Azure (Web Functions) and AWS (Lambda) it has become possible to build applications which don’t use any servers in the cloud.  This has many advantages from an operational perspective

  • No server management
  • Flexible scaling
  • High availability
  • No idle capacity

In addition to this we can easily leverage all of the components that the cloud computing providers have built to improve the way we process and manage data.   … [Keep reading] “Building a Serverless Application in AWS using React and Claudiajs”

Building a Breakfast Ordering Skill for Amazon Alexa – Part 1

25th of June, 2018 / / No Comments

First published at https://nivleshc.wordpress.com

Introduction

At the AWS Summit Sydney this year, Telstra decided to host a breakfast session for some of their VIP clients. This was more of a networking session, to get to know the clients much better. However, instead of having a “normal” breakfast session, we decided to take it up one level 😉
Breakfast ordering is quite “boring” if you ask me 😉 The waitress comes to the table, gives you a menu and asks what you would like to order.… [Keep reading] “Building a Breakfast Ordering Skill for Amazon Alexa – Part 1”

Using AWS EC2 Instances to train a Convolutional Neural Network to identify Cows and Horses

14th of June, 2018 / / No Comments

First published at https://nivleshc.wordpress.com

Background

Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a hobby of mine for years now. After playing with it approximately 8 years back, I let it lapse till early this year, and boy oh boy, how things have matured! There are products in the market these days that use some form of ML – some examples are Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa.
Computational power has increased to the point where calcuations that took months can now be done within days.… [Keep reading] “Using AWS EC2 Instances to train a Convolutional Neural Network to identify Cows and Horses”

Deploying an Active Directory Forest using AWS CloudFormation

27th of May, 2018 / / 1 Comment

First published at https://nivleshc.wordpress.com

Introduction

Wow, it is amazing how time flies. Almost two years ago, I wrote a set of blogs that showed how one can use Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates and Desired State Configuration (DSC) scripts to deploy an Active Directory Forest automatically.
For those that would like to take a trip down memory lane, here is the link to the blog.
Recently, I have been playing with AWS CloudFormation and I am simply in awe by its power.… [Keep reading] “Deploying an Active Directory Forest using AWS CloudFormation”