Amazon QuickSight – An elegant and easy to use business analytics tool

9th of April, 2018 / / No Comments

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

Introduction

Recently, I had a requirement for a tool to visualise some data I had collected. My requirements were very simple. I didn’t want something that would cost me a lot, and at the same time I wanted the reports to be elegant and informative. Most of all, I didn’t want to have to go through pages and pages of documentation to learn how to use it.
As my data was within Amazon Web Services (AWS), I thought to check if AWS had any such offerings.… [Keep reading] “Amazon QuickSight – An elegant and easy to use business analytics tool”

Implementing a Break Glass Process with AWS Systems Manager

1st of March, 2018 / / No Comments

Modern day organisations rely on systems to perform critical, sometimes lifesaving tasks. As a result, a common requirement for many organisations is a break-glass process, providing the ability to bypass normal access control procedures when existing authentication mechanisms fail. The implementation of a break glass system often involves considerable effort to ensure the process is not open to malicious use and is auditable, yet simple and efficient. The good news is AWS Systems Manager (SSM) with AWS Key Management Service (KMS) can be leveraged to allow administrative users the ability to recover access to systems on-demand, without having to bake in privileged users with predefined passwords on systems.… [Keep reading] “Implementing a Break Glass Process with AWS Systems Manager”

AWS DeepLens – Part 1 – Getting the DeepLens Online

27th of February, 2018 / / 1 Comment

Look what I got my hands on!

Today I will be taking you through the initial setup of the yet to be released AWS DeepLens. DeepLens is rumoured to be released globally in April 2018.

What is the AWS DeepLens?

Announced at AWS Re-Invent 2017, DeepLens is a marriage of:

  • HD Camera
  • Intel based computer with an on-board GPU
  • Ubuntu OS
  • AWS Greengrass
  • AWS IOT
  • AWS Lambda
  • AWS SageMaker

This marriage of technologies is designed to assist developers achieve Deep-Learning inference at the edge device.… [Keep reading] “AWS DeepLens – Part 1 – Getting the DeepLens Online”

On-demand, Scaleable VPN Access to AWS

3rd of February, 2018 / / No Comments

Recent growth in our Managed Services business (driven in part by our acquisition by Telstra) has meant that a number of tools and processes that we have previously taken for granted have had to be re-assessed and re-architected to allow us to scale and maintain the same level of service at low costs.
One particular area that we’ve recently reworked is how we remotely access and administer workloads within customer’s AWS environments. Previous methods of access leveraged either static bastion hosts or VPN endpoints and they worked well up until a point, but after analysing at the overall footprint of resources used and costs incurred by doing so, it became clear to us that we needed to find a better way.… [Keep reading] “On-demand, Scaleable VPN Access to AWS”

Supercharge your CloudFormation templates with Jinja2 Templating Engine

26th of January, 2018 / / 1 Comment

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”

Replacing the service desk with bots using Amazon Lex and Amazon Connect (Part 4)

23rd of January, 2018 / / No Comments

Welcome back to the final blog post in this series! In parts 1, 2 and 3, we set up an Amazon Lex bot to converse with users, receive and validate verification input, and perform a password reset. While we’ve successfully tested this functionality in the AWS console, we want to provide our users with the ability to call and talk with the bot over the phone. In this blog post, we’ll wire up Amazon Connect with our bot to provide this capability.… [Keep reading] “Replacing the service desk with bots using Amazon Lex and Amazon Connect (Part 4)”

Patching LINUX EC2 through SSM

23rd of January, 2018 / / 5 Comments

This blog deals with configuring patches for Linux EC2 instances through AWS Systems Manager (SSM).
Mentioned below is the link for patching Windows-based EC2 instances using SSM
https://blog.kloud.com.au/2017/05/08/patching-ec2-through-ssm/
The configuration has three major sections

  • EC2 instance configuration for patching
  • Default Patching Baseline Configuration
  • Maintenance Window configuration.

1 Instance Configuration

We will start with the First section which is configuring the Instances to be patched. This requires the following tasks.

  1. Create Amazon EC2 Role for patching with two policies attached
    • AmazonEC2RoleForSSM
    • AmazonSSMFullAccess
  2. Assign Roles to the EC2 Instances
  3. Configure Tags to ensure patching in groups.
… [Keep reading] “Patching LINUX EC2 through SSM”

Update FSTAB on multiple EC2 instances using Run Commands

15th of January, 2018 / / No Comments

Scenario:

  • Customer Running multiple Linux Ec2 instance in AWS.
  • Customer reports that Instances are loosing mount points after a reboot.

Solution :

The resolution requires to update the fstab file on all the instances.
fstab is a system configuration file on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems that contains information about major filesystems on the system. It takes its name from file systems table, and it is located in the /etc directory ( ref : http://www.linfo.org/etc_fstab.html)… [Keep reading] “Update FSTAB on multiple EC2 instances using Run Commands”

Replacing the service desk with bots using Amazon Lex and Amazon Connect (Part 3)

9th of January, 2018 / / 1 Comment

Hopefully you’ve had the chance to follow along in parts 1 and 2 where we set up our Lex chatbot to take and validate input. In this blog, we’ll interface with our Active Directory environment to perform the password reset function. To do this, we need to create a Lambda function that will be used as the logic to fulfil the user’s intent. The Lambda function will be packaged with the python LDAP library to modify the AD password attribute for the user.… [Keep reading] “Replacing the service desk with bots using Amazon Lex and Amazon Connect (Part 3)”

Enable Cost Allocation Tags to differentiate project based billing

8th of January, 2018 / / No Comments

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”