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?”

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”

Highly Available deployment and availability pattern for heritage Windows applications on AWS

14th of May, 2018 / / No Comments

Quite often I am presented with the challenge of deploying Windows COTS applications onto the AWS platform with a need to requirement for taking advantage of cloud native patterns like auto-scaling and auto-healing. In this blog post I’m going to describe how I’ve used Auto Scaling Groups, Load Balancers, Cloudwatch Alarms and Route 53 to provide a self healing implementation for a heritage COTS Windows application. This pattern was also extended to use lifecycle hooks to support a Blue/Green deployment with zero downtime.… [Keep reading] “Highly Available deployment and availability pattern for heritage Windows applications on AWS”

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”

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 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)”

Re-execute the UserData script in an AWS Windows Instance

23rd of April, 2017 / / 11 Comments

First published at https://nivleshc.wordpress.com
Bootstrapping is an awesome way of customising your instances in AWS (similar capability exists in Azure).
To enable bootstrapping, while configuring the launch instance, in Step 3: Configure Instance Details scroll down to the bottom and then expand Advanced Details.
You will notice a User data text box. This is where you can provide your bootstrap script. The script will be run when your instance is first launched.
AWS_BootstrapScript
I went ahead and entered my script in the text box and proceeded to complete my instance configuration.… [Keep reading] “Re-execute the UserData script in an AWS Windows Instance”

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”