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  • 13 min read

Plan for Unsuccessful Changes; A Use Case of the AWS Health API

Radlands

Boardgame

Radlands is a fast-paced card game where you lead a tribe of survivors in a harsh post-apocalyptic world. Your tribe has settled near a rare water source and uses strange old technology from abandoned military experiments to stay alive. Other tribes want your water and are preparing to attack. To win, you’ll need to use your cards wisely, protect your three camps, and perform regular healthchecks to ensure their survival. If all your camps are destroyed, you lose. Radlands is all about strategy, survival, and fierce battles. For more information, visit: boardgamegeek

Resiliency: A Shared Responsibility in the Cloud

This blog post is inspired by the Chalk Talk session titled ARC317 - Operational Excellence: Best Practices for Resilient Systems from AWS re:Invent 2024. You can explore the presentation deck on the AWS events content.

According to the AWS Well-Architected Framework, resiliency is defined as the ability of a system to recover from failures caused by load, attacks, or internal faults. These failures can stem from various sources, such as hardware malfunctions, software bugs, operational errors, or environmental disruptions.

In the cloud era, ensuring resiliency is not solely the responsibility of cloud consumers. Instead, it operates on a shared responsibility model, where both cloud providers and customers play critical roles.

  • 9 min read

Run Amazon Linux on your infrastructure

The Grizzled

Boardgame

French soldiers, on the front lines, promise each other that they’ll survive to come back all together no matter what happens. Without ever touching on the warlike aspect, “The Grizzled” offers each player the chance to feel some of the difficulties suffered by the soldiers in the trenches. Thus the emotions around the table will often be intense.

The Grizzled is a cooperative game about survival in the trenches during the first World War where players win or lose together.Players take turns either playing cards from their hand, representing threats like mortar shells or negative personality traits, or opting out of the mission. Successful progress depends on correctly playing threat cards. Too many occurrences of a threat result in mission failure, highlighting the need for planning, teamwork, and a touch of luck. For more information, visit: boardgamegeek

There is still a significant demand for running services on virtual machines. In the realm of the AWS cloud, utilizing AWS EC2 emerges as the prime choice for VM deployment. AWS offers a wide array of Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) suitable for installation on EC2 instances. However, AWS also presents a tailored Linux AMI known as Amazon Linux, which is crafted to furnish a stable, secure, and high-performance execution environment for applications hosted on EC2.

Setting up an Ubuntu machine on a personal computer or a homelab server is a straightforward process. One simply needs to download the appropriate image tailored to their virtualization environment and initiate the VM. However, the question arises: How does one setup AWS Linux locally, facilitating testing and exploration of the image without incurring the additional expense of provisioning an EC2 instance on AWS?

This blog post elucidates the steps required to configure AWS Linux within your local environment, thereby obviating the need for EC2 provisioning and facilitating cost-effective experimentation and testing.

  • 7 min read

Take an action based on AWS API calls

Gizmos

Boardgame

Don’t lose your energy marbles in this crazy building game. Gizmos puts players in the role of inventors. By using the four types of energy marbles, they will create their own personal Gizmo, adding on one Machine card at a time. Machines award you victory points and enable additional actions upon meeting specific conditions. As you build, new attachments can trigger chain reactions, letting you do even more on your turn. For more information, visit: boardgamegeek

Overview; Detect AWS console login

This blog post explores the integration of AWS CloudTrail and EventBridge, forming a winning combination. The objective is to detect and notify logins to my AWS account. So, whenever someone successfully logs into my AWS account, I will receive an email notification containing the login details.

While this blog post may seem straightforward, it serves as an insightful initiative for developing more intricate integrations. Towards the end of the post, I will present some additional ideas. Before diving into the implementation, let's first explore the concept of event-driven architecture. After gaining a solid understanding of this concept, we'll proceed to examine AWS EventBridge and CloudTrail.

  • 7 min read

Unraveling Recursive Loops in AWS Lambda

lambda-loop

Boardgame

The Next Station board game series begins with a London edition, and the latest addition features Tokyo. This game tasks players with redesigning the city's underground subway system. The goal is to optimize connections, serve as many attractions as possible, and make efficient use of the tunnels under the city. One of the fundamental rule of the game is that players cannot circle back to the starting station – in other words, loop is not permitted. For more information, visit: boardgamegeek

Last year, I awoke to a startling email from AWS billing service. My personal AWS account had amassed charges amounting to $4,000. Initially, I dismissed it as a bizarre dream, a shepherd's nightmare, if you will. But reality struck—it was a genuine email. The AWS billing page echoed the same staggering figure.

My AWS account is typically a sandbox for experimentation, with monthly expenses hovering around $100. So, what triggered this financial avalanche?

  • 7 min read

Yo-Yo attacks on cloud auto-scaling

Camel Up

Boardgame

Camel Up is a popular board game designed by Steffen Bogen. It is a family-friendly, light-hearted, and entertaining game that revolves around a crazy camel racing event. What makes Camel Up particularly unique and enjoyable is the unpredictability of the race. The camels stack on top of each other when they land on the same space, creating a camel stack. The camels at the top of the stack move faster, while the ones at the bottom move slower. This adds an element of surprise and excitement, making it challenging to predict the winner until the very end.

Camel Up board game and auto-scaling in the cloud may appear as two completely distinct area. However, the camels' movement—going up and down—in the game reminds me of the process of scaling resources in cloud auto-scaling.

Cloud auto-scaling is a very powerful tool, but it can also be a double-edged sword. Without the proper scaling configuration and testing it can cost cloud users a lot. So, auto-scaling is a trade of performance and cost.