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Blog post summary: Automating safe, hands-off deployments at AWS

AWS’s Clare Liguori wrote an excellent blog post on Automating safe, hands-off deployments.

This is a summary (1,700 words, vs 5,300 in the original) and mostly just a copy & paste of highlights. I have also skipped some of the sections that are at scales larger than most folks deal with (e.g. global releases across 26 regions!).

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File, Block and Object Storage

I was in an AWS class today, where they were talking about S3, and how it is “object storage”. But what does that mean? One way to explain it is to contrast it with other types of file storage, namely File and Block Storage.
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Top 5 announcements from AWS re:Invent 2018

AWS re:Invent has just completed. It was a huge event with 50,000+ attendees across 7 of the biggest hotels in Vegas, and many new service announcements.

Serverless continue to get lots of attention with new lambda enhancements and better container support. The “hybrid” model of using your own datacenter in conjunction with a cloud provider has been fully embraced by AWS with the new “Outposts” capabilities. Machine learning also got much love with several new services using and supporting it. Read on for my top picks from this week’s announcements…

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Service Mesh: Istio and AWS App Mesh

One of the big announcements at AWS re:Invent this week was the AWS App Mesh.

Before talking about it though, let’s look at what the heck a mesh is anyway…

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Talk summary: SRE principles by Tori Wieldt @ AWS re:Invent 2018

I caught a talk by Tori Wieldt at the New Relic booth at AWS re:Invent on “SRE principles”. Even though it was a short talk in the expo hall, rather than a formal scheduled one, it had a ton of good SRE material.

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AWS Re:Invent 2018 Keynote announcements

Highlights from today’s 2018 AWS Re:Invent Keynote by CTO Werner Vogel.

 

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Passed AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate

I just completed my “AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate”.

If you’re interested in AWS Certification, this AWS Certification Roadmap gives an overview of the certifications available, and this post from New Relic has details on the order you may want to take the exams in.

The AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate exam I started with is a tough exam. I’d estimate I spent over 100 hours preparing, and I used every one of the 130 minutes available in the exam to answer all 65 questions.

I’ve included a few exam prep tips below.

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AWS approximate storage costs

This post covers some high-level cost approximations for data storage in AWS. I find this a useful rule of thumb, and please see the long list of caveats and notes below, but as a rough approximation of ballpark costs…

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Setting up a VPC in AWS

In the previous blog post, we created a simple HelloWorld example in AWS. We did the bare minimum (as any HelloWorld example should!) by taking advantage of a default VPC, Subnet, NACL, and Internet Gateway but, by necessity for our example, creating a custom Security Group.

In this tutorial, we will shy away from defaults and create a VPC from scratch. Again, this is done in the guise of HelloWorld.

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HelloWorld on an AWS EC2 instance

This is a basic “HelloWorld” tutorial for AWS EC2. We create an EC2 instance, enable the required access, and install Apache to serve a trivial HelloWorld html file.

 

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AWS Best Practices Architecting for the Cloud – Concise Summary

The following is a concise summary of Architecting for the Cloud: AWS Best Practices. The original is about 13,000 words; There is an abridged version of about 4,000 words, and this is an even more concise version, at about 1,500 words.

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AWS Best Practices Architecting for the Cloud – Abridged

The following is an abridged version of Architecting for the Cloud: AWS Best Practices.This is essentially a cut and paste of the most salient parts (the original is about 13,000 words; this is about 4,000). For an even more concise version, see the concise summary (about 1,500 words).

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AWS Well-Architected Framework – Abridged

This is an abridged version of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. It is essentially a cut and paste of the most salient parts (the original is about 18,000 words; this is about 4,000).

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AWS S3 SLAs

According to the AWS S3 docs, S3 is designed for 99.99% availability over a given year, but their SLA compensates you when availability drops below 99.9% monthly uptime. That is, you will receive some level of refund (up to 25%) if there is more than 43 minutes of downtime per month.

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