Experiences with the new AWS Application Load Balancer

29th of November, 2016 / / No Comments

Originally posted on Andrew’s blog @ cloudconsultancy.info

Summary

Recently I had an opportunity to test drive AWS Application load balancer as my client had a requirement for making their websocket application fault tolerant. The implementation was complete windows stack and utilised ADFS 2.0 for SAML authentication however this should not affect other people’s implementation.
The AWS Application load balancer is a fairly new feature which provides layer 7 load balancing and support for HTTP/2 as well as websockets.… [Keep reading] “Experiences with the new AWS Application Load Balancer”

Site Delivery with AWS CloudFront CDN

29th of November, 2016 / / 1 Comment

Nowadays, most companies are using some sort of a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to improve the performance and high availability of their sites, those include Azure CDN, CloudFlare, CloudFront, Varnish, and so on.
In this blog however, I will demonstrate how you can deliver your entire website through AWS’s CloudFront. This blog will not go through other CDN services. This blog also assumes you have knowledge of AWS services, DNS, and CDN.
What is CloudFront?

Amazon CloudFront is a global content delivery network (CDN) service that accelerates delivery of your websites, APIs, video content or other web assets.

… [Keep reading] “Site Delivery with AWS CloudFront CDN”
Ubuntu security hardening for the cloud.

Hardening Ubuntu Server Security For Use in the Cloud

26th of October, 2016 / / 1 Comment

The following describes a few simple means of improving Ubuntu Server security for use in the cloud. Many of the optimizations discussed below apply equally to other Linux based distribution although the commands and settings will vary somewhat.

Azure cloud specific recommendations

  1. Use private key and certificate based SSH authentication exclusively and never use passwords.
  2. Never employ common usernames such as root , admin or administrator.
  3. Change the default public SSH port away from 22.
… [Keep reading] “Hardening Ubuntu Server Security For Use in the Cloud”

Viewing AWS CloudFormation and bootstrap logs in CloudWatch

30th of August, 2016 / / No Comments

Mature cloud platforms such as AWS and Azure have simplified infrastructure provisioning with toolsets such as CloudFormation and Azure Resource Manager (ARM) to provide an easy way to create and manage a collection of related infrastructure resources. Both tool sets allow developers and system administrators to use JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) to specify resources to provision, as well as provide the means to bootstrap systems, effectively allowing for single click fully configured environment deployments.

While these toolsets are an excellent means to prevent RSI from performing repetitive monotonous tasks, the initial writing and testing of templates and scripts can be incredibly time consuming.… [Keep reading] “Viewing AWS CloudFormation and bootstrap logs in CloudWatch”

Migrating resources from AWS to Microsoft Azure

22nd of August, 2016 / / 1 Comment

Kloud receives a lot of communications in relation to the work we do and the content we publish on our blog. My colleague Hugh Badini recently published a blog about Azure deployment models from which we received the following legitimate follow up question…

So, Murali, thanks for letting us know you’d like to know more about this… consider this blog a starting point :).… [Keep reading] “Migrating resources from AWS to Microsoft Azure”

AWS CloudFormation AWS::RDS::OptionGroup Unknown option: Mirroring

17th of August, 2016 / / No Comments

Amazon recently announced Multi-AZ support for SQL Server in Sydney, which provides high availability for SQL RDS instances using SQL Server mirroring technology. In an effort to make life simpler for myself, I figured I’d write a CloudFormation template for future provisioning requests, however it wasn’t as straight forward as I’d expected.

I began by trying to guess my way through the JSON resources, based on what I’d already knew for MySQL deployments. I figured the MultiAZ property was still relevant, so I hacked together a template and attempted to provision the stack, which failed, indicating the following error:

CREATE_FAILED        |  Invalid Parameter Combination: MultiAZ property cannot be used with SQL Server DB instances, use the Mirroring option in an option group associated with the DB instance instead.… [Keep reading] “AWS CloudFormation AWS::RDS::OptionGroup Unknown option: Mirroring”

Creating a simple nodejs API on AWS (including nginx)

26th of November, 2015 / / 3 Comments

On a recent project I was part of a team developing an AngularJS website with a C# ASP.NET backend API hosted in Azure.  It was a great project as I got to work with a bunch of new tools, but it got me wondering on how simple it could be to use a Javascript API instead.  That way the entire development stack would be written in Javascript.

And so a personal project was born.  To create a simple JS API and get it running in the cloud.… [Keep reading] “Creating a simple nodejs API on AWS (including nginx)”

AWS Direct Connect in Australia via Equinix Cloud Exchange

21st of July, 2015 / / 5 Comments

I discussed Azure ExpressRoute via Equinix Cloud Exchange (ECX) in my previous blog. In this post I am going to focus on AWS Direct Connect which ECX also provides. This means you can share the same physical link (1GBps or 10GBps) between Azure and AWS!

ECX also provides connectivity service to AWS for connection speed less than 1GBps. AWS Direct Connect provides dedicated, private connectivity between your WAN or datacenter and AWS services such as AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).… [Keep reading] “AWS Direct Connect in Australia via Equinix Cloud Exchange”

Automate your Cloud Operations Part 2: AWS CloudFormation

16th of May, 2015 / / No Comments

Stacking the AWS CloudFormation

Automate your Cloud Operations blog post Part 1 have given us the basic understanding on how to automate the AWS stack using CloudFormation.

This post will help the reader on how to layer the stack on top of the existing AWS CloudFormation stack using AWS CloudFormation instead of modifying the base template. AWS resources can be added into existing VPC using the outputs detailing the resources from the main VPC stack instead of having to modify the main template.… [Keep reading] “Automate your Cloud Operations Part 2: AWS CloudFormation”

Amazon Web Services (AWS) networking: public IP address and subnet list

8th of May, 2015 / / No Comments

Originally posted on Lucian’s blog over at Lucian.Blog.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has many data centre’s in many continents and countries all over the world. AWS has two key grouping methods of these data centres: regions and availability zones.

It can be very handy to either reference the IP address or subnet of a particular service in say a proxy server to streamline connectivity. This is a good practice to avoid unnecessary latency via proxy authentication requests. Below is an output of Amazon Web Services IP address and subnet details split into the key categories as listed by AWS via thier publishing of information through the IP address JSON file available here.

Sidebar: Click here to read up more on regions and availability zones or click here or click here. Included in these references is also information about the DNS endpoints for services that are therefore IP address agnostic. Also, If you’d like more details about the JSON file click here.

Read More