Two Buckets and a Lambda: a pattern for file processing
This post is a “deep dive” on the architectural decisions, and operational concerns, and simple mechanics of triggering a Lambda from an S3 upload.
CloudFormation Tips and Tricks
I’ve noticed that many of Chariot’s clients — from 4-person startups to 40,000-person multinationals — use CloudFormation for their infrastructure-as-code. For them and others, here are some tips that I’ve learned while developing CloudFormation templates over the past five years.
Delving into CloudTrail events
CloudTrail provides you with an audit log of every successful API call made in your AWS account. This post focuses on management events in CloudTrail, and techniques for exploring and analyzing those events using a search engine such as Elasticsearch with Kibana.
Using AWS CostExplorer to find forgotten services
In this post I’ll give an introduction to Budgets, and walk through using Cost Explorer to find a forgotten Sagemaker notebook.
Building Developer Sandboxes on AWS
The ability to experiment is one of the unsung benefits of cloud computing. It was, in fact what drew me to AWS in 2008. At Chariot, we have multiple sandbox environments, some for specific projects and some for general play, and recommend that our clients do the same. However, sandboxes need some controls, to ensure that they don’t become a source of runaway costs.
re:Invent Recap
Chariot’s AWS Practice Lead, Keith Gregory, recaps his experience at Amazon’s re:Invent conference in 2019.
IoT on AWS, a recap
If you weren’t able to attend our IoT on AWS one-day conference, here’s a recap.
Managing Your AWS Credentials
Given that hardcoding is a bad idea, how should you manage your AWS keys? AWS gives you three options, which we analyze in this post.
Managing AWS users and roles in a multi-account organization
My last post compared different infrastructure tools for creating users and letting them assume roles for cross-account access. I received a few questions about the underlying problem that those scripts were trying to solve, so this post delves a bit deeper into the realm of user management.
Comparing Infrastructure Tools: A First Look at the AWS Cloud Development Kit
This post is a head-to-head comparison between CDK, Terraform, and CFNDSL, using a common task: managing the users and their roles in your AWS accounts.