During development of an AWS Lambda function utilizing the recently released AWS Cost Explorer API, the latest version of boto3 and botocore was discovered to be unavailable in the Lambda execution environment. The Lambda execution environment supported version of an AWS SDK can lag behind the latest release found on GitHub, which can cause supportability issues when writing Lambda code attempting to use the most recently added features of AWS SDKs. This blog post will explore using boto3 1.4.8 and botocore 1.8.0 despite (at the time of this writing) the Lambda execution environment defaulting to boto3 1.4.7 and botocore 1.7.37. This … Read More
VMware hosted on AWS?
Some exciting news came out of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and VMware last year with the announcement of VMware Cloud on AWS. VMware has been the bedrock of enterprise virtualization and the leading software-as-a-datacenter for years. AWS presented the world with a new way to think about datacenters and quickly became a leader in cloud computing. A limiting factor in using AWS was the vast differences in how AWS and VMware worked to accomplish similar tasks. You will find the same buzz words, such as snapshots, but not the same actions from them. This has presented the industry with a … Read More
Automatically install software to your new AWS EC2 instances
When creating an AWS EC2 instance, you can configure a startup script or list of commands to be automatically executed. The commands are performed immediately following initialization and the process allows you to start multiple configured instances. This saves time by having programs install themselves before you have ever even needed to log in. The Advanced Details section in Step 6 of creating a new EC2 instance in the AWS dashboard provides a text area to enter all commands. The example in the photo shows some commands to update and install MySQL Database on an enterprise Linux instance. This allows a user to have access to an … Read More
Compatibility of AWS EC2 API Actions and IAM Policy Resource-Level Permissions
In this blog post I will examine how partial implementation of a feature of IAM policies: resource-level permissions interacts with AWS EC2 API actions to produce confusing results. Please note that AWS states in its documentation that it is planning on expanding the compatibility of resource-level permissions, so check the links at the bottom of this post for the most up-to-date information. Below is a short python program (troubleshooting.py) that utilizes the ec2:DescribeVolumes action. As you can see, I have omitted the access/secret key pair. If you wish to use this code, simply insert your access/secret key you obtained from the IAM … Read More
Amazon Web Services on Salesforce
There is an App available from Salesforce that makes connecting S3 buckets and EC2 instances incredibly simple. Referred to as the Amazon Toolkit. With Salesforce as a leader in the SaaS world, one might not see why integrating with AWS, a leader in the IaaS world, would be beneficial. Salesforce allows you to create incredibly simple custom apps for just about any requirement, but the raw data in these apps tends to be tucked away and hidden. Sometimes an organization might need to analyze data beyond Salesforce’s capabilities, or as a way of saving costs by backing up older records and … Read More
AWS Opens Frankfurt Region
Amazon Web Services has announced the opening of the Frankfurt region, which is the second region in the European Union after Ireland. Two availability zones (AZs) are offered and Amazon reported that the Frankfurt region operates carbon-free, just as the US West (Oregon) and GovCloud regions do. The Frankfurt region supports a large number of AWS services and a full listing of services available from all AWS regions is available in Amazon’s Products and Services by Region page. While on the Products and Services by Region page, one may notice that there are also 3 Frankfurt AWS Edge locations, of particular … Read More
M&S Consulting Organizes Amazon Web Services Pittsburgh Meetup
The first Amazon Web Services meetup of this year will be taking place on August 27th 7PM at RevvOakland. With monthly meetings planned for AWS among other events in the planning stages, M&S Consulting is now playing a greater part in connecting and stimulating the Pittsburgh cloud and virtualization community. We’ll be doing a compare and contrast of AWS Workspaces versus other public and private cloud DaaS offerings. Come for a brief presentation by Joe Perks of M&S Consulting and meet those in the Pittsburgh area doing great things with AWS! Remember, the meetups we host are always free and are … Read More
AWS Adds Docker Support to Elastic Beanstalk
Today Amazon announced and deployed Docker support for Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon Web Service’s Platform as a Service offering. This brings the supported platforms to the following list: Node.JS, PHP, Python, .NET, Java, Ruby and Docker. Now it is easier than ever to deploy onto AWS your Docker backed application at any scale, from a single instance on up. From the AWS blog post: “To use an image with Elastic Beanstalk, you will create a file called Dockerrun.aws.json. This file specifies the image to be used and can also set up a port to be exposed and volumes to be mapped in … Read More