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”

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)”

Replacing the service desk with bots using Amazon Lex and Amazon Connect (Part 2)

20th of December, 2017 / / No Comments

Welcome back! Hopefully you had the chance to follow along in part 1 where we started creating our Lex chatbot. In part 2, we attempt to make the conversation more human-like and begin integrating data validation on our slots to ensure we’re getting the correct input.

Creating the Lambda initialisation and validation function

As data validation requires compute, we’ll need to start by creating an AWS Lambda function. Head over to the AWS console, then navigate to the AWS Lambda page.… [Keep reading] “Replacing the service desk with bots using Amazon Lex and Amazon Connect (Part 2)”

Replacing the service desk with bots using Amazon Lex and Amazon Connect (Part 1)

18th of December, 2017 / / No Comments

“What! Is this guy for real? Does he really think he can replace the front line of IT with pre-canned conversations?” I must admit, it’s a bold statement. The IT Service Desk has been around for years and has been the foot in the door for most of us in the IT industry. It’s the face of IT operations and plays an important role in ensuring an organisation’s staff can perform to the best of their abilities.… [Keep reading] “Replacing the service desk with bots using Amazon Lex and Amazon Connect (Part 1)”

A Closer Look at Amazon Chime

28th of March, 2017 / / No Comments

In news this quarter AWS have released a web conferencing cloud service to their existing ‘Business Productivity‘ services which already includes Amazon WorkDocs and Amazon WorkMail. So my thought was to help you gauge where this sits in relation to Skype for Business. I don’t want to put this into a Microsoft versus Amazon review but I do want you to understand the product names that ‘somewhat’ align with each other.

Exchange = WorkMail

SharePoint/OneDrive for Business  =  WorkDocs

Skype for Business  = Chime

The Microsoft products are reasonably well known in the world so I’ll give you a quick one liner about the Amazons products:

WorkMail “Hosted Email”

WorkDocs “Hosted files accessible via web, PC, mobile devices with editing and sharing capability”

So what is Chime?

… [Keep reading] “A Closer Look at Amazon Chime”

Dynamically rename an AWS Windows host deployed via a syspreped AMI

20th of March, 2017 / / 2 Comments

One of my customers presented me with a unique problem last week. They needed to rename a Windows Server 2016 host deployed using a custom AMI without rebooting during the bootstrap process. This lack of a reboot rules out the simple option of using the PowerShell Rename-Computer Cmdlet. While there are a number of methods to do this, one option we came up with is dynamically updating the sysprep unattended answer file using a PowerShell script prior to the unattended install running during first boot of a sysprepped instance.… [Keep reading] “Dynamically rename an AWS Windows host deployed via a syspreped AMI”