Tag: Amazon AWS

5 Fancy Reasons and 7 Funky Uses for the AWS CLI

5 Fancy Reasons and 7 Funky Uses for the AWS CLI has a few good examples of AWS CLI usage:

  1. AWS CLI Multiple Profiles
  2. AWS CLI Autocomplete
  3. Formatting AWS CLI Output
  4. Filtering AWS CLI Output
  5. Using Waiters in the AWS CLI
  6. Using Input Files to Commands
  7. Using Roles to Access Resources

There also a few useful links in the article, so make sure you at least scroll through it.

AWS X-Ray – Analyze and debug production, distributed applications

 

I think I’m giving up on even knowing the list and purpose of all the Amazon AWS services, let alone how to use them.  Here’s one I haven’t heard about until this very morning: AWS X-Ray.

AWS X-Ray helps developers analyze and debug production, distributed applications, such as those built using a microservices architecture. With X-Ray, you can understand how your application and its underlying services are performing to identify and troubleshoot the root cause of performance issues and errors. X-Ray provides an end-to-end view of requests as they travel through your application, and shows a map of your application’s underlying components. You can use X-Ray to analyze both applications in development and in production, from simple three-tier applications to complex microservices applications consisting of thousands of services.

AWS IAM Policies in a Nutshell

J Cole Morrison wrote an excellent guide into AWS IAM policies. It’s super useful for anyone who have tried implementing IAM policies and failed (or even barely succeeded).

What is an AWS IAM Policy?

A set of rules that, under the correct conditions, define what actions the policy principal or holder can take to specified AWS resources.

That still sounds a bit stiff. How about:

Who can do what to which resources. When do we care?

There we go. Let’s break down the simple statement even more…

Compared to all the AWS documentation one has to dive through, this one is a giant time saver!

Why Configuration Management and Provisioning are Different

In “Why Configuration Management and Provisioning are Different” Carlos Nuñez advocates for the use of specialized infrastructure provisioning tools, like Terraform, Heat, and CloudFormation, instead of relying on the configuration management tools, like Ansible or Puppet.

I agree with his argument for the rollbacks, but not so much for the maintaining state and complexity.  However I’m not yet comfortable to word my disagreement – my head is all over the place with clouds, and I’m still weak on the terminology.

The article is nice regardless, and made me look at the provisioning tools once again.