AWS

You can now schedule and manage EC2 snapshots from the AWS console. No longer is it necessary to script this out. How's this done? At a high level, You can create a policy to snapshot every 12 or 24 hours based on a tag, setting the number of snapshots to retain. Enable policy, tag instances … Continue reading AWS Snapshot Lifecycle Policies- Finally!

I recently deployed AWS GuardDuty for a client and wanted to share some thoughts on the services at a high level. If unfamiliar, GuardDuty is a managed threat detection service that continuously monitors for malicious or unauthorized behavior by evaluating VPC Flow Logs, CloudTrail and DNS Logs (if using AWS DNS). The Good A single click … Continue reading Thoughts on AWS GuardDuty

AWS recently introduced spread placement groups, an important piece for high availability for certain types of smaller deployments. Let's say your workload required 4 instances and you've placed 2 instances Availability Zone A and 2 in Availability Zone B within a single region.  With a normal deployment, it would be possible for the instances in … Continue reading Spread Placement Groups

This hasn't happened to me, but knowing that it could encourages me to take note of how to address the scenario if it occurs. I came across a great example here (great step-by-step instructions). To sum up: Shutdown your instance Create an AMI Launch an instance from an AMI where you can create/choose a private … Continue reading What To Do If You Lose Your EC2 Private Key