Cross-Region Replication for Amazon S3 was introduced last year which enables replicating objects from a S3 bucket to a different S3 bucket located in different region (it can be same/different AWS account). It’s one of the most sought after feature for long time but it doesn’t solve some of the scenarios as defined below. Synchronizing to a bucket in same region. Synchronizing to multiple destination buckets. Object ACLs needs to be set at the source bucket hence multiple different ACLs needs to be set when copying across different accounts. Replication doesn’t change the ownership of the objects hence bucket policy applied at the destination bucket won’t be honored. Refer the feedback from AWS support team regarding the last point mentioned above. Read more

Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 5 was released on 27th April 2016 & it’s well known by now that it supports docker with its windows server containers. Microsoft also started uploading windows server core with various application as docker images to docker hub. I was wondering whether it’s possible to run Windows 2016 TP5 on an EC2 instance and launch a windows container inside the EC2 instance. EC2 officially supports only upto Windows 2012 R2 and I couldn’t find any 2016 AMI’s in Ireland region. Hence I decided to install Windows 2016 TP5 on local VirtualBox, upload it to S3 create AMI out of it and launch the EC2 instance. Read more

Amazon did a limited release of the programmable Dash button and unsurprisingly it got sold out within a day. It’s stated in amazon.com that “We don’t know when or if this item will be back in stock.”, hence you might need to wait to get one. I take this opportunity to write a post about how I used the AWS IoT button that I received in AWS re:Invent 2015 to show case AWS IoT to the team. Read more

Blue/Green deployment is a well-known method to deploy an application without any downtime. Performing DNS switch is one of the very common techniques to achieve this. Using DNS switch has a minor issue with DNS caching which might take some time for DNS change to be propagated. Apart from DNS switch, AWS gives us two different options to switch the stacks. One is to have single ELB and swap it across auto-scaling group and another is switching the launch configuration of the auto-scaling group. Check the following presentation on various methods to achieve blue/green deployment in AWS. Read more

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. I took this Linux Academy course. It was helpful to refresh all the topics and useful on services which I didn’t use regularly. Quiz provided by Linux Academy was okay. I tried Cloud Academy quiz and it had lots of typo and didn’t cover all the sections. Reading the product documentation, FAQs, whitepapers & case studies were useful. Most of the questions had multiple requirements which covers more than 3 AWS services. Hence while answering we need to make sure that the selected answer is best suitable for all the requirements. Some of the questions on outdated (which is expected) referring to old reservation model. But they did a good job in avoiding feature specific questions which might change. Certain AWS services like Direct Connect, Storage Gateway, CloudFront, IAM, S3 were prominent. Knowledge on storage concepts like RAID, iSCSI connections used in Storage Gateway, etc will be useful. Deep knowledge on Networking especially VPC, VPN, Routing, etc would help. Good understanding of Web Identity federation, SAML based federation, Custom identity broker & SSO to Management console is needed. Knowledge on media streaming, download/upload options, performance and cost benefits using CloudFront would be required. You might already know that the questions & answers are lengthy. Many questions have at least two correct answers and identifying the best answer was really tricky. 72 questions in 170 minutes looks achievable and I had 25 minutes to spare after reviewing all the questions which I marked for review. Don’t miss to take the practice exam (it costs $40) and it will help you to understand your area of strength and weakness. Take a practice exam after you complete your preparation and before booking the exam. Based on the result you shall book or study deeply on the sections that you need more attention. Don’t take the practice exam multiple times since the questions will be same during all the attempts of practice exam (you shall find this detail in fine prints when you try to re-book for practice exam). I would say all the effort and money that you spend on this certification is worth it. Read more