If you had noticed, there has been a gap of few weeks since my last post. I went off the radar to prepare for AWS Certified Solution Architect Professional exam. Lots of learning and completed it successfully. I can’t provide any details on the questions since I have signed a NDA. But I shall provide some suggestions based on my experience. Read through the blue print and understand the weight-age for different sections. Read more

Let’s Encrypt is a free and open certificate authority managed by a public benefit organization called ISRG which concentrates on the security communication over the Internet. There are many technology companies like Mozilla, Akamai, EFF, Cisco, IdenTrust, Facebook, etc are sponsors and the platinum sponsors have a seat in their Technical Advisory Board. It uses Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME) protocol to enable communication between the certification authority and the web server to which the certificate is issued. Read more

CloudFormation uses a pre-signed S3 URL to receive the response back from the custom resources managed by it. There are few blue prints available for Node.js Lambda custom resources but nothing available for python yet. Hence I created this simple function which shall be used to send the response back to CFN custom resource by performing PUT request to the pre-signed S3 URL. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 import json import requests def lambda_handler(event, context): responseStatus = 'SUCCESS' responseData = {} if event['RequestType'] == 'Delete': sendResponse(event, context, responseStatus, responseData) responseData = {'Success': 'Test Passed. Read more

I prefer creating the base AMI using packer; RDS snapshot using a Jenkins job which get triggered whenever there is a change in the database schema in the SCM. In case of installers, binaries, etc. it would be best to store them in a single S3 bucket. In all the above mentioned scenarios I prefer to share those resources to a 3rd party AWS account and remove the share when not needed. Read more

Last week AWS enhanced CloudFormation by adding new services like AWS CodePipeline, AWS Config, AWS KMS and few more; default stack limit also has been increased from 20 to 200. Among other new features they also have introduced this small but useful parameters grouping and labelling feature. Earlier all the parameters in a CFN template get listed in alphabetical order based on the logical name of the parameter. Also the parameters logical name is restricted to alphanumeric characters hence it causes some restrictions. Read more