Website Down? How to Manually Increase Amazon EBS Volume Size and Get Back Online Fast!
It was a regular day, and everything was running smoothly—customers were browsing your website, orders were coming in, and business was booming. The server was handling traffic efficiently, and everything seemed to be operating as expected. But then, disaster struck—your website suddenly crashed. Panic set in as you scrambled to find out what had happened. Was it a DDoS attack? A misconfiguration? A sudden surge in traffic? You immediately [...]
Seamless Monitoring: Get Slack Alerts for Every AWS Lambda Function Update
Keeping track of updates in your AWS Lambda function seems like an easy task, but it is actually time-consuming. Leaving your Lambda function unattended after deployment may incur risks in missing crucial updates that may affect its overall performance and functionality. And most of the time, you also do development tasks which might limit your attention to these Lambda functions. That's why you must be informed whenever an update [...]
SST: Effortless Full-Stack Deployment on AWS
Thinking of other ways how to deploy your full-stack web applications to AWS? Well, there is open-source framework that we can use to deploy web applications to AWS without ever touching the AWS Console because we know how easy it is to get lost in the number of services AWS offers but no worries! If you are a developer and prefers to have their whole Infrastructure as Code (IaC), [...]
The Evolving Landscape of Digital Dialogue: DeepSeek vs. ChatGPT
In the sprawling digital age, where information spreads like a rapidly growing network, and the need for intelligent interaction grows significantly, artificial intelligence has stepped into the spotlight, transforming how we engage with technology and machines. DeepSeek and ChatGPT have emerged as important players in the field of natural language processing, each carving out their own specialty. These platforms, while sharing the common goal of facilitating human-computer interaction, differ [...]
AI-Driven Video Creation: How Luma AI Ray2 and Amazon Bedrock Are Transforming Content Production
The video production landscape is experiencing significant changes driven by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning advancements. These technologies are transforming how video content is created and consumed, offering creators and businesses new avenues for visual storytelling. A key player in this evolution is Luma AI’s Ray2, an innovative AI-powered video generation model that revolutionizes video production when integrated with the robust features of Amazon Bedrock. Luma AI Ray2 [...]
Creating a Self-Healing Mechanism for a Lightweight Website
Downtime can be a major disruption for any website, but for lightweight websites like personal blogs or any type of static site, a simple restart of the instance might be all that's needed to resolve the issue. In this article, we'll walk through setting up a self-healing mechanism using AWS Lambda and Amazon EventBridge. This will automatically detect if your website is down, restart it, and send a notification [...]
DeepSeek in Amazon Bedrock: A Comprehensive Demo
Bookmarks DeepSeek in Amazon Bedrock Workflow Overview DeepSeek in Amazon Bedrock Pre-requisites Implementation Processes As of January 2025, we’re seeing too much news about DeepSeek AI features in many media outlets, but how about implementing DeepSeek AI and AWS workloads? DeepSeek AI in Amazon Bedrock Anyone? Well, one of the most interesting NLPs that sparked this January 2025 is DeepSeek Multimodal AI. There [...]
PHP-FPM Failures Are Killing Your Uptime – Automate Slack Alerts Before It’s Too Late!
In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, where user expectations are at an all-time high, even a few seconds of downtime can have catastrophic consequences. Lost revenue, user dissatisfaction, and damage to your brand reputation are just the tip of the iceberg. If you're still relying on manual methods to monitor PHP-FPM (PHP FastCGI Process Manager), you're leaving your system vulnerable to undetected issues that could lead to catastrophic failures. PHP-FPM [...]
Commanding Genomics: AWS CLI for Bioinformatics Workflows
“This is becoming more troublesome…” I can hear you mumble as you move your mouse to click on the different AWS services you need in the console. As time goes by, it can get tiresome to keep on clicking things for your workflow instead of doing them in just one place. You can streamline this process with the AWS CLI! Knowing not only how to work with AWS Console, [...]
Simplifying Knowledge Management with a Content Analysis Tool for Confluence
Did you know that organizations spend an average of 19% of their workweek searching for and gathering information? According to research from McKinsey & Company, inefficient knowledge management leads to wasted time and lost productivity—hindering teams from making real progress on meaningful work. (Source, McKinsey) In today’s digital-first environment, managing and organizing information is critical—whether in education, project management, or team collaboration. Confluence is a widely used knowledge management [...]
The Path Forward: AI Agents Driving Modern Workflows
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer a concept of the future; it's an integral part of today’s digital era. As AI technology advances, businesses and developers increasingly find innovative ways to integrate machine learning into their workflows. One of the most powerful tools in this transformation is the AI agent—a specialized software that autonomously carries out tasks, communicates with users, and makes informed decisions with minimal human intervention. One [...]
Enhanced Data Processing and Retrieval with Amazon Bedrock’s New Capabilities
Data is at the heart of modern innovation, and the ability to process, analyze, and extract insights from diverse data types is more important than ever. Amazon Bedrock introduces a suite of advanced capabilities designed to simplify data management and enhance AI-driven applications. By automating workflows, integrating multimodal data, and bridging structured and unstructured data, Amazon Bedrock empowers businesses to turn raw information into actionable intelligence, driving efficiency and [...]
Let’s Learn Firecracker MicroVM with Go Firecracker SDK!
Wondering how AWS Lambda works under the hood? You're in the right place! To begin with, in this blog, we'll explore Firecracker, which is the revolutionary technology powering the AWS Lambda Service. More specifically, we'll delve into what Firecracker is and gain a deeper understanding of its core features. In addition to that, we'll learn about MicroVMs (Micro Virtual Machines) and uncover how they contribute to the efficiency of [...]
Troubleshooting AWS Lambda and Amazon DynamoDB Connection Issues
Many consider Amazon DynamoDB to be one of the most effective solutions for handling vast amounts of data in the AWS Cloud. Its serverless architecture and highly scalable design ensure reliable performance, making it suitable for applications that demand fast, consistent, and low-latency access to data. DynamoDB's ability to handle large datasets while having steady integration with other AWS services further makes it appropriate for data-driven features. Its serverless [...]
Automating File Uploads from Slack to Amazon S3: Harnessing AWS Lambda and Slack API
Efficient management and storage of files is vital for any team’s productivity. Automating the process of uploading files from Slack directly to Amazon S3 using AWS Lambda provides a streamlined and secure method for file storage. This integration guarantees that files shared on Slack are systematically stored in a scalable manner, ensuring they are easily accessible for future reference. Leveraging AWS Lambda and the Slack API, this solution minimizes [...]
Unlocking the Secrets of DNA: Analyzing Genomic Data with AWS
Your DNA has the blueprint for your life. Much like everybody else, as it determines everything from our physical characteristics to our susceptibility to diseases. However, there is the challenge of decoding this complexity efficiently and accurately. With AWS HealthOmics—an AWS service for storing, querying, analyzing, and generating insights from genomics and other biological data. AWS HealthOmics helps scientists and researchers to unlock the mysteries of DNA at scale [...]
Understanding Resource Groups in Azure
Have you ever wondered how to manage and organize resources in the cloud effectively? With over 95% of companies using Microsoft Azure, mastering Resource Groups is crucial for efficient cloud management. Azure Resource Groups are the cornerstone of managing and organizing resources in Microsoft Azure. Whether you're new to Azure or looking to optimize your existing infrastructure, understanding Resource Groups is essential. This article will walk you through the [...]
Cost Notifier: Keep Track of Your Google Cloud Platform Expenses
Have you ever had that moment when you realize your cloud costs have unexpectedly increased? Keeping track of your Google Cloud Platform (GCP) expenses usually requires manual effort, as you need to visit the console regularly. But what if you could receive daily updates on your costs automatically? Enter Slack notifications! Imagine receiving a daily report about your GCP billing directly in your favorite messaging app. It’s like having [...]
AWS Reserved Instance Management Made Easy with Slack Alerts
In today's fast-changing world of cloud computing, it's crucial to manage AWS resources efficiently. One important task is keeping track of Reserved Instances (RIs) to save costs and use resources wisely. This guide will show you how to set up a simple system that sends AWS Reserved Instance alerts to Slack, helping you stay on top. Reserved Instances (RIs) can save you a lot of money compared to On-Demand [...]
Build a Web-Based Linux Terminal Playground
In this blog, I will guide you through creating a Simple Web-Based Linux Terminal Playground that enables running Linux commands directly in the browser. We will use technologies such as Podman for containerization, React for the UI, and Express and node-pty for the backend. WebSockets will handle real-time communication between the frontend and backend, creating a seamless, secure, and interactive environment to learn and execute Linux commands. Each connection [...]
AZ-400 Microsoft DevOps Engineer Expert Exam Study Path
Bookmarks Prerequisites Study Materials Azure Services to Focus On Validate Your Knowledge Final Remarks The AZ-400 Microsoft DevOps Engineer Expert certification is designed for professionals who want to demonstrate their expertise in implementing DevOps practices using Microsoft Azure technologies. This certification validates your ability to design, implement, and manage DevOps processes, including version control, build and release management, testing, and infrastructure [...]
Understanding AWS Responsible AI: Key Concepts and Dimensions
As AI becomes a bigger part of our lives, it’s important to make sure it’s used responsibly. Responsible AI means building and using AI systems in ways that are ethical, fair, and accountable. AWS provides a range of tools to help organizations build AI systems that follow these principles. In this blog, we’ll look at what responsible AI is, the key dimensions of responsible AI on AWS, and the tools [...]
SRA Toolkit + AWS: Revolutionizing Bioinformatics Data Prep
It takes too long. It’s boring. I want the good stuff already… Sounds familiar? These statements are not entirely wrong, but data preparation in any kind of data analytics job is still important and must be executed carefully. This is an important step that can easily take up to 80% of the total working time of a project. For insightful results, the data must be prepared properly, and this [...]
Mastering Prompt Engineering for AWS Large Language Models (LLMs)
In the rapidly evolving world of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), Prompt Engineering has become a cornerstone skill for effectively harnessing the power of Large Language Models (LLMs). These models transform industries, power intelligent chatbots, automate workflows, and redefine customer experiences. Yet, the key to unlocking their full potential is crafting clear, precise prompts tailored to specific tasks. Far from being a mere technical skill, Prompt Engineering [...]
Monitoring Amazon SES Complaint Rates with CloudWatch Alarms and Real-Time Slack Notifications
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) is a powerful tool for sending high volumes of emails quickly and efficiently. However, to maintain your email-sending capabilities and ensure high deliverability, it's essential to monitor your sender's reputation closely. One key metric for assessing this reputation is the Complaint Rate, which measures how often recipients mark your emails as spam. A high complaint rate can lead to your emails being filtered into [...]
Methods in Evaluating Foundation Model Performance
A foundation model is a large-scale, pre-trained artificial intelligence model that serves as a general-purpose system for various downstream tasks. These models, such as GPT for natural language processing or CLIP for vision-language understanding, are trained on extensive datasets and can be fine-tuned or adapted to specific applications. Foundation models are characterized by their ability to generalize across tasks, making them highly versatile and impactful in AI-driven solutions. Evaluating these [...]
Amazon SES Complaint Rate: What It Is and How to Manage It
Email remains one of the most effective ways of communication for businesses in today's digital age. It allows you to reach out to current and potential customers through newsletters, promotions, important information, and updates about your products and services. Whether it is to keep your customers engaged, promote your new offerings, or send transactional messages like order confirmations and such, email is a simple yet very powerful approach to [...]
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for Foundation Model Customization
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has rapidly advanced, pushing the limits of what machines can accomplish. However, one significant challenge remains: ensuring that AI responses are both accurate and contextually relevant while being up-to-date. This is where Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) comes in—a cutting-edge approach that integrates the capabilities of data retrieval with advanced AI generation techniques. In this blog, we will explore the details of RAG, discussing its benefits, applications, and [...]
Security in AWS Data Engineering: Best Practices and Strategies
Bookmarks The AWS Shared Responsibility Model Use AWS Data Encryption Use Identity and Access Management (IAM) Implement Network Security Monitoring and Logging Compliance Standards Data Governance Secure Data Storage Backup and Disaster Recovery Automating Security Practices Conclusion: Proactive Security Measures for Data Engineers References In today's world of Cloud Computing, data engineering security and [...]
Understanding Your API: The API-verse
In this blog, I will guide you through understanding the various types of APIs. You'll learn about different API classifications you can use for your next project and when to implement each one. This high-level overview of API varieties will expand your knowledge and help you become well-versed in how each API functions. What is an API? (Application Programming Interface) An API or Application Programming Interface acts as a [...]
PartyRock: AI Python Code Checker for Tech Interview Simulation
Bookmarks What is Party Rock? AI Code Checker Tools Comparison UI Components of our PartyRock-based Python Code Checker Python Interview Topics Covered by the PartyRock app Use-cases and Applications of PartyRock-based Python Code Checker Hands-on Exercise: Getting Started with PartyRock Final Remarks References Are you a recent college graduate or someone transitioning into a tech career, striving to [...]
Implementing IP Blocking and Unblocking Using AWS Lambda, Slack, and AWS Systems Manager
Blocking IP addresses is a crucial security measure for protecting an organization's infrastructure from various cyber threats, including DDoS attacks, brute-force login attempts, and unauthorized access. By blocking malicious or suspicious IPs, organizations can prevent system compromise, reduce unwanted traffic, and ensure that only trusted networks access critical resources. This helps maintain the performance and stability of the systems while ensuring compliance with security policies. Automating IP blocking using [...]
AWS in Bioinformatics: Biology, data, & the cloud
Marriage of biology and tech. With the current technological advancements, how about we throw in the cloud in the tech too? Just like... Bioinformatics in AWS HealthOmics. Yes, you read that right! Are you torn between the two and want to pursue them both? To sit in a laboratory working on something new and interesting without bidding your farewell to the “Hello World!”? Then this article will introduce a [...]
Deploy a Next.js Static Site to AWS with GitHub Actions and Bunjs
At the AWS Community Day Philippines 2024, during the preparation for the event, the organizers assigned me the responsibility of setting up a Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) strategy for the website. Therefore, in this blog, I will explain the approach I took and how I utilized GitHub Actions and BunJs to create a swift and efficient CI/CD pipeline for deployment on Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) along [...]
Setting up Slack notifications on Tag Modifications for EC2 Instances
Monitoring resource configurations in a dynamic cloud environment is important, especially in production. One essential aspect of managing AWS resources, such as Amazon EC2 instances, is tracking tag modifications. Tags are not just labels but vital in organizing resources, enabling billing allocation, and enforcing compliance policies. Any unintentional tag modification can disrupt operations or mislead resource management, making timely alerts vital. This article will guide you through setting up [...]
Introduction to Amazon SQS FIFO and Standard Queues
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) is a fully managed message queuing service by AWS that allows distributed applications to communicate asynchronously, making it a critical tool for decoupling microservices and improving system resilience. SQS offers two types of queues tailored for different use cases: Standard Queues: These queues are designed for high throughput, allowing an unlimited number of transactions per second while supporting at-least-once message delivery. Although standard queues [...]
AWS Console-to-Code: Seamlessly Transform Manual Actions into Reusable Code
Cloud computing today demands efficiency and automation like never before. AWS Console-to-Code is an innovative tool designed to bridge manual operations with automated infrastructure management. By transforming console actions into reusable Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), this feature streamlines workflows, enhances consistency, and accelerates deployment processes. This article will guide you through the process of implementing AWS Console-to-Code to launch Amazon EC2, VPC, and RDS. What is AWS Console-to-Code? AWS Console-to-Code utilizes Amazon Q Developer [...]
Automate CloudFront Invalidation via Slack
In today's digital age where most people are using gadgets, we're likely familiar with the term "cache". Most of us first hear about cache when looking to free up storage or improve performance on our mobile devices especially for android users. If we look at our device's settings then navigate to the storage of an application, we will see two options: one is to delete the app entirely, and [...]
AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer Associate Exam – MLA-C01 Study Path Exam Guide
Bookmarks What's new? Exam Domains AWS Services to Focus on Exam Prep Materials Validate Your Knowledge Final Remarks The AWS Machine Learning Engineer Associate - MLA-C01 Certification exam is one of the newest certifications of Amazon Web Services. This exam assesses a candidate’s ability to develop, deploy, and manage machine learning (ML) solutions and workflows on AWS. This includes the ability [...]
AWS Certified AI Practitioner Exam – AIF-C01 Study Path Exam Guide
Bookmarks What's new? AIF-C01 Exam Domains AWS Services to Focus on AIF-C01 Exam Prep Materials Validate Your Knowledge Final Remarks The AWS AI Practitioner - AIF-C01 Certification exam is one of the newest certifications of Amazon Web Services. This exam is intended for individuals who can effectively demonstrate an overall knowledge of AI/ML, generative AI technologies, and associated AWS services and tools [...]
Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler
Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler Cheat Sheet Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler streamlines data preparation and feature engineering for machine learning. Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler is a feature in Amazon SageMaker Studio Classic. It integrates data from various sources, allows you to explore, clean, transform, and visualize data, and automates these steps in your machine-learning workflow. Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler Core Functionalities Data Wrangler provides core functionalities to facilitate data analysis and [...]
Streamline Log Monitoring for Nginx with CloudWatch Agent
Monitoring the health and performance of your applications is essential for maintaining reliable operations, detecting issues, and troubleshooting efficiently. Monitoring logs can provide invaluable insights into server behavior, user activity, and error occurrences regarding web services. However, tracking logs across distributed systems can be challenging. Amazon CloudWatch Agent is a powerful tool that collects metrics and logs from your EC2 instances and on-premises servers and centralizes them in Amazon [...]
Automated Slack Notifications for RI Coverage Across All AWS Regions
Efficient management of cloud resources is essential for maintaining a company's flexibility and cost-effectiveness. Reserved Instances (RIs) offer significant cost-saving opportunities, but to fully leverage its benefits, consistent monitoring and optimization are key. By automating Slack notifications for RI coverage, businesses can ensure teams stay informed and take timely action to maximize savings. This comprehensive article explores the advantages of integrating automated Slack notifications for RI coverage across all [...]
Streamline Your Workflow: Automating User Email Retrieval in WordPress with AWS SSM and Lambda via Slack command
In today’s fast-paced digital environment, operational efficiency and security are important. This blog post explores a streamlined approach to retrieving user emails from specific IPs in WordPress using Slack Slash commands powered by AWS Systems Manager (SSM) and AWS Lambda. Automating this process significantly reduces the operational overhead associated with running SQL commands manually. Additionally, this method enhances security by allowing users who lack access to production environments to [...]
RI Utilization vs RI Coverage: Difference Between these Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance Metrics
The Amazon EC2 enables developers up to businesses to deploy their own applications with flexibility, high availability, and cost-efficiency as it removes the need to invest in physical hardwares or servers. From running applications, hosting websites, and managing databases, EC2 serves as the foundation for anything that is cloud-based. Talking about its cost-efficiency, there are different "Instance Purchasing Options" that you can choose from depending on your server requirements [...]
How to Install Docker on Ubuntu using Amazon EC2
This tutorial will assist in setting up Docker on an Amazon EC2 Ubuntu instance. Docker's containerization and Ubuntu's user-friendliness make cloud application deployment and management simple. Amazon EC2 provides scalable infrastructure for hosting Docker containers, allowing for smooth app management and scaling. To easily set up Docker on your EC2 instance, just follow this tutorial. What is Docker? Docker is an open-source platform that simplifies the process of building, [...]
Amazon SageMaker Feature Store
Amazon SageMaker Feature Store Cheat Sheet Amazon SageMaker Feature Store is a centralized repository for managing machine learning features. It simplifies the process of data exploration, model training, and batch predictions by providing a unified view of your features. Enhances ML model development and deployment efficiency. How does it work? SageMaker Feature Store stores features in feature groups. A feature group is a collection of related features that can [...]
How to configure AWS Lambda Function URL with Cross-Origin Resource Sharing
Get started learning how to build your first-ever Python Labs Client App, a web application that leverages the power of serverless computing. This creative application is primarily designed to cater to individuals eager to enhance their Python programming skills. By using the flexibility and scalability of AWS Lambda, you'll be able to create dynamic and interactive web experiences without the hassle of managing infrastructure. This Python Code Playground will [...]
Migration Evaluator Cheat Sheet
Migration Evaluator Cheat Sheet Migration Evaluator is a service that helps organizations assess their on-premises infrastructure and plan a migration to AWS. It provides insights into the costs of running current workloads on AWS and recommends optimized AWS resources based on usage patterns. Migration Evaluator Use Cases Use the Agentless Collector for broad discovery of your infrastructure or securely upload existing inventory data for analysis and insights. Capture a [...]
Advancing Your Tech Career: Why Cloud Certifications Matter
As technology advances at a breakneck pace, cloud computing fosters innovation and industry growth. Whether you're an IT veteran or transitioning into a new career, staying relevant means more than just acquiring technical skills—it also involves earning certifications demonstrating your cloud proficiency. This article will explore why certifications from significant providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) are essential and how they can [...]
Availability of AWS Local Zones in Manila: What This Means for the Philippines’ Tech Landscape
On June 19, 2023, AWS launched its Local Zones in Manila, marking a significant milestone in the Philippines' cloud computing journey. AWS Local Zones are extensions of AWS Regions designed to bring cloud services closer to users, offering low-latency access and localized data processing. This development is set to transform the tech landscape in the Philippines, enhancing performance for various applications. In this article, we'll explore how to enable [...]
Understanding VPC Flow Logs: Capturing Network Traffic in AWS
Imagine a bustling city with a vast network of roads and highways connecting every corner. Like this intricate transportation system, the cloud computing world has its complex web of virtual networks, facilitating the seamless flow of data and communication. In this digital metropolis, ensuring security and maintaining visibility over network traffic is paramount. AWS (Amazon Web Services) offers a powerful tool called VPC Flow Logs to help you navigate [...]
How to Set Up Slack Notifications for WordPress Admin Logins with IP Address Details
Keeping track of who logs into your WordPress site is important for maintaining security. If you're running a website, you want to be immediately alerted to any admin login activity, whether it's you or someone else. One of the most effective ways to accomplish this is to enable Slack notifications for WordPress admin logins. This way, you'll receive instant alerts directly in your Slack channel whenever someone logs into [...]
Enabling the Account-Level Suppression List in Amazon SES
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) is a powerful tool that enables businesses to send bulk and transactional emails to customers. It provides a reliable and scalable platform for sending marketing campaigns, transactional notifications, or customer communications. However, maintaining a good sender reputation and adhering to email regulations are critical for successful email delivery. To help manage email deliverability effectively, Amazon SES offers account-level suppression lists, which are a valuable [...]
Email Sender Application with Amazon SES
Whether you’re part of a business or organization, sending out emails is crucial for connecting with people. More often than not, you’ll find yourself needing to send similar emails to a group and sometimes, they need to be dynamic. Yes, you can send out one email and just add everyone to the BCC but having a dynamic and more personalized email helps create a better connection between you and [...]
Digital Bridge of Connectivity: All about the Bifrost Cable System
As digital era progresses, the demand for a high-speed and stable internet connection grows. While we are already familiar with the medium of internet transmission such as standard cable, fiber optics, and through satellite, one medium that is often overlooked is the undersea cable. It is expected since unlike those that are visible everywhere, undersea cables are not as noticeable since… well, they are literally laid on the seabed. [...]
Transferring an Amazon Route 53 Domain to Another AWS Account: Troubleshooting DNS Propagation
I recently transferred my domain to a different AWS account. However, despite waiting for the standard 24-48-hour DNS propagation period, I noticed the changes were not propagating as expected. In this article, we’ll delve into the steps I followed, potential pitfalls, and solutions to ensure a smooth domain transfer process. DNS propagation is the process of updating and reflecting changes made to your domain's DNS records across all DNS [...]
Understanding the Importance of Bastion Hosts in AWS
This short article will discuss what a bastion host is and its importance in your cloud architecture. We will also talk about its various use cases, relevance, and the related processes of setting it up in the AWS Cloud. What is a Bastion Host? A Bastion host, often called a jump server, is critical to securing cloud environments. It acts as an intermediary providing secure access to resources in [...]
Amazon EKS vs Amazon ECS
Elastic Container Service (ECS) Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) Overview AWS’s fully managed container orchestration service for Docker containers. Designed for simplicity and ease of use. Seamless integration with AWS services and minimal management overhead. Tightly coupled with AWS, making it a cloud-native service. AWS’s managed Kubernetes service. Offers Kubernetes flexibility with AWS’s management and scaling. Ideal for teams needing Kubernetes features and ecosystem. Kubernetes is cloud-agnostic and [...]
Creating a Custom HTML Editor in React
This article guides you through integrating a TinyMCE WYSIWYG text editor into a React application which focuses only on the Text Area that displays the HTML code alongside the TinyMCE Text Editor. It covers setting up TinyMCE, managing state, and ensuring real-time updates between the text editor and text area. Whether you’re building a CMS, a blog platform, or an internal tool, this will help in the content editing [...]
AWS Community Day Philippines 2024
The AWS Community Day Philippines 2024 is an exciting event for tech enthusiasts taking place on September 21-22, 2024, at the Arthaland Century Pacific Tower in BGC, Taguig. Hosted by the AWS User Group Philippines (AWSUG PH), this event is sure to have lots of knowledge-sharing and networking opportunities. What is AWS User Group Philippines? AWS User Group Philippines (AWSUG PH) is a Philippine-based user group made up [...]
Understanding Security Groups and Network Access Control Lists (NACLs) in AWS
Security within cloud environments is a critical consideration, and AWS offers robust tools to ensure that your cloud infrastructure remains secure. Two critical components in AWS for managing security are Security Groups and Network Access Control Lists (NACLs). These tools act as virtual firewalls, controlling the traffic that enters and exits your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). While they serve similar purposes, they operate differently and are used in distinct [...]
Path-Based Routing with Application Load Balancer (AWS ALB): Efficiently Directing Traffic Based on URL Paths
An Application Load Balancer enables you to set up a listener with rules that direct incoming requests to target groups based on the URL. This capability is unique to Application Load Balancers and is not offered by other load balancer types like Classic Load Balancer, Network Load Balancer, and Gateway Load Balancer. The path pattern rules only apply to the path of the URL and do not consider the [...]
How to Change an AWS ACM Certificate on Amazon CloudFront Distribution
Before diving into the steps on how to change an AWS ACM-generated SSL Certificate, it’s important to understand the basics and benefits of this service. Having a solid understanding will provide context for the actions we are about to take and help us appreciate the value AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) brings to the table. What is the AWS Certificate Manager (ACM)? AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) is a service designed [...]
Real-Time AWS Health Dashboard Updates via Slack Notifications
In an organization or for users that use cloud services, staying updated with the status and health of cloud services is crucial. It's not just about maintaining operational efficiency and minimizing downtime; it's also about peace of mind and ensuring a seamless experience for both the team and customers. The AWS Health Dashboard provides detailed information about the health of AWS services and resources. To ensure timely awareness of [...]
Amazon Redshift Serverless
Bookmarks Use Cases Features Components Monitoring Security Pricing Amazon Redshift Serverless Cheat Sheet Amazon Redshift Serverless allows users to run and scale analytics without managing the underlying data warehouse infrastructure. It dynamically adjusts compute capacity to handle fluctuating query loads, delivering high performance and efficiency for analytical workloads. Amazon Redshift Serverless Use Cases Ideal for workloads with unpredictable usage patterns, [...]
Automated RDS Snapshot Management for Improved Data Security
The Automated Daily RDS Export ensures that daily snapshots of Amazon RDS instances are created and made shareable. While RDS takes daily snapshots automatically, these are not shareable by default. To address this, we copy the snapshots and share the copies with a designated backup account. This process uses AWS Lambda Functions and Amazon EventBridge to automate the task. EventBridge triggers the Lambda function daily, which handles copying and [...]
Solving HTTP 500 Errors by Increasing File Descriptor Limits
When it comes to web hosting and server management, facing HTTP 500 errors can be a challenging obstacle. Such errors frequently arise from file descriptor limits, which restrict the server's capacity to manage incoming requests efficiently. However, by understanding how to expand these limits, you can reduce the occurrence of HTTP 500 errors and guarantee more seamless operations for your web applications. Raising file descriptor limits helps fix HTTP [...]
Exploring C++ with AWS Lambda Custom Runtime
AWS Lambda is a great service for running code without worrying about server management. While it traditionally supports languages like Python, Node.js, and Java, AWS now allows you to run code in any language using custom runtimes. In this blog post, I'll walk you through setting up a C++ Lambda function that calculates the Fibonacci series. We'll leverage the performance and efficiency of C++ to build a function that [...]
Automating Slack Notification for Route 53 TTL Changes
Automating a Slack notification system for Route 53 with a 60-second TTL is intended to provide real-time alerts about DNS records with short TTLs. This setup ensures administrators receive quick notifications via Slack, enabling them to promptly identify and resolve potential issues. Through this proactive measure, the optimal performance and reliability of the AWS infrastructure are maintained. Moreover, this approach allows administrators to avoid potential problems by taking corrective [...]
Daily AMI Export: Enhancing Backup and Recovery
Daily automation of Amazon Machine Image (AMI) export is vital for keeping IT systems strong and dependable. This process ensures that the latest version of your system's setup is always saved. If something goes wrong, like a system crash, having these up-to-date backups means you can quickly get things back up and running. Additionally, it makes it easier to grow or move your systems because you have readily available [...]
AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer Associate MLA-C01 BETA Exam Guide
The AWS Training and Certification team recently released the new AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer Associate MLA-C01 exam along with the AWS Certified AI Practitioner AIF-C01 test this June 2024. This new role-based, Associate-level AWS certification exam will allow you to validate your machine learning skills to your current or future employer as well as improve your AI know-how in relation to AWS. You can be among the [...]
New AWS Certified AI Practitioner AIF-C01 BETA Exam Guide
Do you always sharpen your competitive edge in the highly competitive IT industry? Are you planning to position yourself for career growth and reach greater remuneration? Generative AI has been making waves in almost every aspect of the economy and job market to the point that the skills you have today could be worth less, or even worth absolutely nothing by nascent AI-powered tools from OpenAI's ChatGPT, Meta's LLaMa, [...]
Setting Up Slack Notifications for AWS Budget Alerts
Introduction Managing cloud costs effectively is crucial for businesses. AWS provides a feature to set budget alerts that notify you when your costs exceed a certain threshold. While these alerts can be sent via email, they can sometimes get lost in the flurry of daily emails, leading to delayed responses. This is where real-time Slack notifications for AWS budget alerts come into play. By integrating AWS budget alerts with [...]
Understanding and Managing AWS Lambda Recursive Loop Invocations
Introduction AWS Lambda is a serverless computing service that allows developers to run code without provisioning or managing servers. It automatically scales applications by running code in response to events and only charges for the compute time used. This makes AWS Lambda an ideal choice for building scalable and cost-effective applications. However, one challenge that developers might encounter is recursive loop invocations. This occurs when a Lambda function inadvertently [...]
Basic Authentication with AWS Rekognition
In this day of technology, it feels like every application has an AI/ML feature built into it, be it home appliances or accessories, chatbots in websites, or even watches. Not having a feature that uses AI or ML in your application feels like you're getting left behind, and it's very beneficial for users. But building an ML/AI feature from the ground up is no easy task, and it takes [...]
Managing AWS Resources from Slack with Slash Commands
Slack is a crucial application for most businesses. It allows the people working within to seamlessly communicate with one another. Slack offers a lot of features such as channels for text communication, huddles for group calls, canvas for a synchronized knowledge base, and more. As businesses or professionals in the tech industry, you'd be glad to know that Slack also supports app integrations, allowing you to bring your technical [...]
Basics of the Basics to AWS – Bonus Part: Machine Learning and AI
Over the past few years, AI has become the number 1 trend in the tech industry and it's easy to see why. With powerful generative AI models like GPT4, we are starting to experience what AI can really do. Fast forward to the present, many businesses rely on AI to improve their efficiency and optimize their expenses. With our growing application, we can utilize AI to give a better [...]
Basics of the Basics to AWS – Part 5: Security
With our application available on the internet for millions of users to access, it is now more vulnerable than ever to exploitations and cyber attacks like unauthorized access or Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDOS). Security could either make or break our application and it is a topic that we must not ignore. With thousands of user data under our protection, it is up to us to properly safeguard our application. Welcome to part [...]
Basics of the Basics to AWS – Part 4: Network
Cloud Service Providers, such as AWS, use various networking features to power its cloud computing platform. Having foundational computer networking knowledge will certainly come handy to properly configure your cloud applications and systems. It's important to know about the basics such as the 7 layers of the Open System Intercommunication (OSI) Model and Domain Name System (DNS) but fortunately, AWS makes some parts of networking easier for us. Welcome [...]
Basics of the Basics to AWS – Part 3: Databases
Data plays an important part in today's world and there's no better way to handle data than with a database. The only question now is whether we need a structured database or a more flexible database. Welcome to part 3 of my 6-part series called Basics of the Basics to AWS, where I introduce you to AWS by breaking it down into smaller digestible concepts related to software development. [...]
Unified Slack Automation for Purging the Cache
Cached data can sometimes be corrupted, which can lead to performance problems. It can also prevent applications and websites from loading the latest version of their content. That’s why clearing cache is a must, not only does it resolve these issues, it also clears up space. Clearing cache is also a way to protect privacy since cache can hold sensitive information. About the task Currently, when purging the cache [...]
Basics of the Basics to AWS – Part 2: Storage
Every application contains instructions made up of bytes and we want to make sure that these are kept safe in a secure storage system. When building applications on the cloud, it's beneficial to know about the different types of storage systems to pick the right tool for the job. Welcome to part 2 of my 6-part series called Basics of the Basics to AWS, where I introduce you to [...]
How to Implement CloudFormation Creation Policy on Ubuntu
Welcome to our guide on implementing AWS CloudFormation Creation Policy on Ubuntu! If you're diving into cloud infrastructure management with AWS CloudFormation, understanding Creation Policies is crucial for ensuring smooth stack creation and resource management. In this article, we'll delve into CloudFormation Creation Policy, a vital attribute for orchestrating resource creation in AWS CloudFormation. While focusing on Ubuntu, we'll also cover the essential installation of CloudFormation helper scripts, which [...]
How to Enable Slow Logging in PHP-FPM
In the dynamic field of online development, ensuring that PHP applications run smoothly is paramount, and performing its best is critical. In this article, we will discuss how to effectively identify and address issues that could impact system functionality and user experience, developers must excel in troubleshooting techniques. Logging plays an essential role in this process as it captures detailed information about the application’s behavior during its execution. By [...]
Setting Up Real-Time Slack Notifications for Amazon EC2 and EBS Events: A Step-by-Step Guide
Overview Stay updated with your Amazon EC2 and EBS events directly through your Slack channel. This guide will walk you through the process of setting up a system that sends a Slack notification for the following events: Creation of an AMI: Notifies when an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is being created from an EC2 instance. This is represented by the CreateImage event. Rebooting of an EC2 Instance: Alerts when an instance [...]
Harnessing Real-Time Slack Notifications for Amazon RDS Event Monitoring
Efficient management and monitoring of database instances are crucial for any business to ensure smooth performance. Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a widely used solution for managing relational databases in the cloud. Staying informed about important events and changes within the database instances is a critical aspect of RDS management. Real-time notifications are vital to keep teams updated and responsive to these events. Slack is a popular platform for real-time notifications and seamless team communication and information [...]
Basics of the Basics to AWS – Part 1: Computing
At the core of every application is computing power which is mostly in the form of a server but, do you know about Serverless computing and Microservices architecture? When it comes to building your cloud applications, it's certainly an advantage to know about servers and architecture. Welcome to part 1 of my 6-part series called Basics of the Basics to AWS where I introduce you to AWS by breaking [...]
AWS Student Community Day Philippines 2024
April 17, 2024, a day filled with learning and curiosity. This prestigious event was held at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines, Bulwagang Balagtas. This event served as a guide for budding tech enthusiasts and students who want to learn and dive into the world of cloud computing with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Throughout the day, participants got to listen to inspiring and knowledge filled discussions each designed to [...]
Basics of the Basics to AWS – Part 0: Where do we begin?
This 6-part series is inspired from a talk I gave on the AWS Student Community Day 2024 Philippines. Through this series, I will be teaching you the basics of AWS through a gimmick I call “Build an App with Me”. This gimmick will be about us trying to model an application’s system architecture through the use of AWS services. Through this gimmick, I aim to give you all a [...]
AWS for Students, Exploring Cloud Solutions
AWS extends far beyond just Lambda functions, providing an extensive range of vital services for learning and skill development. Throughout this blog, we will explore how Amazon Web Services (AWS) can benefit students interested in cloud computing as we cover various AWS services and their practical applications, helping them effectively leverage the opportunities it presents for aspiring professionals in the field of cloud computing. Starting off with examining AWS [...]
AZ-500 Microsoft Azure Security Engineer Associate Exam Sample Exam Questions
Here are 10 AZ-500 Microsoft Azure Security Engineer Associate Exam practice exam questions to help you gauge your readiness for the actual exam. Question 1 You have an Azure subscription and need to assign a role to a team member who must adhere to the principle of least privilege. This team member's task is to audit and report on Microsoft Entra ID, requiring view-only access to all settings and [...]
Amazon Q
Bookmarks Features Sub-modules Pricing References Amazon Q Cheat Sheet Amazon Q is an AI assistant that’s designed to be generative, meaning it can generate content, solve problems, and perform tasks using the data and expertise within your company. Use Cases Amazon Q is designed to provide quick and relevant answers to questions, streamline tasks, speed up decision-making, and foster creativity and innovation at [...]
Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow
Bookmarks Key Features Security Pricing References Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA) Cheat Sheet Amazon MWAA is a service that helps you manage and automate your data workflows using Apache Airflow. Workflows are designed as Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) using Python. Use Cases Complex Data Workflows: Handles complex data processing tasks. ETL Jobs: Coordinates Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) processes. Machine Learning: Prepares [...]
AZ-500 Microsoft Azure Security Engineer Associate Exam Study Path
Bookmarks Study Materials Azure Services to Focus On Validate Your Knowledge Final Remarks The AZ-500 Microsoft Azure Security Engineer Associate certification is designed for security engineers who are responsible for security posture, implementing security controls, managing identity and access, and protecting data, applications, and networks in cloud and hybrid environments as part of an end-to-end infrastructure. Similar to AZ-305, it's aimed at [...]
AWS Glue Data Quality
Bookmarks Features Pricing References AWS Glue Data Quality Cheat Sheet AWS Glue Data Quality is a service that provides a way to monitor and measure the quality of your data. It’s part of the AWS Glue service and is built on the open-source DeeQu framework. Use Cases Analyzing data sets that are cataloged in the AWS Glue Data Catalog. Continuously monitoring the quality [...]
AWS Glue DataBrew
Bookmarks Features Components Pricing References AWS Glue DataBrew Cheat Sheet AWS Glue DataBrew is a tool designed to streamline your data analysis process. It allows you to interact with your data directly, eliminating the need for complex coding. With its extensive library of over 250 pre-built transformations, you can easily clean, normalize, and format your data, preparing it for insightful analysis. AWS [...]
Utilizing Lambda Functions to Control Amazon EC2 Instances via Slack
Managing and controlling resources is crucial in the cloud computing environment. Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers various services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which provides scalable computing capacity in the cloud. Alongside AWS services, communication and collaboration tools like Slack have become integral to modern workflows. This article explores how to seamlessly integrate AWS Lambda functions with Slack to enable users to invoke actions such as rebooting, stopping, [...]
Enabling Virtual Deliverability Manager in Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES)
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) offers a cloud-based solution tailored for digital marketers and application developers aiming to distribute various emails, including marketing emails, notifications, and transaction-based communications. This service stands out for its reliability and cost-efficiency, making it an ideal choice for enterprises of varying sizes wishing to maintain consistent communication with their clientele. Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) addresses the intricate challenges associated with large-scale email dispatches [...]
Validate Referrer Headers Using CloudFront Function
Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery network (CDN), lets you distribute content with low latency and high data transfer speeds. One of its many features is the ability to create CloudFront functions, which are lightweight functions that can manipulate HTTP requests and responses. This article will discuss creating a CloudFront function to validate Referrer headers. Referrer Headers Referrer headers are an essential part of HTTP requests, as they indicate the [...]
My AWS Certified Data Engineer Associate DEA-C01 Exam Experience 2024
I recently took the actual exam of the AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate DEA-C01 online. Interestingly, it has some resemblances with the exam content of the AWS Certified Data Analytics Specialty test, albeit not entirely the same in terms of depth. This new Associate-level exam aims to validate the skills and knowledge of IT Professionals in core data-related AWS services, such as the ability to implement data pipelines, [...]
Building Data Pipelines with No-Code ETL Using AWS Glue Studio
Introduction Welcome to the dynamic world of AWS Data Engineering! This beginner-friendly guide introduces you to the essentials of data staging and transformation within the AWS ecosystem without needing to code. By exploring the foundational use of Amazon S3 and AWS Glue, this guide provides a practical starting point for understanding how AWS data is handled and processed. Whether you're aiming for certification or looking to apply these skills [...]
Amazon EventBridge
Bookmarks Overview Concepts Features Additional Information Use Cases Best Practices Pricing References Amazon EventBridge Cheat Sheet Amazon EventBridge is a service that allows applications to communicate with each other using data from different sources in real time. It is a serverless event bus that acts as a centralized hub for ingesting events from various sources and directing them [...]
Entra ID
Entra ID Cheat Sheet Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) An identity and access management solution from Microsoft that helps organizations secure and manage identities for hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Microsoft Entra Verified ID Enables organizations to customize identity verification solutions to address their specific needs. Microsoft Entra Permissions Management A Cloud Infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM) that provides comprehensive visibility and control over permissions for any identity and any resource [...]
Azure Blob Storage
Azure Blob Storage Cheat Sheet Objects in Blob Storage are accessible via: Azure Storage REST API Azure Powershell CLI Types of Storage Account Type Performance Tier Best used for General-Purpose v2 Standard Most scenarios use Blob Storage or one of the other Azure storage services. Block Blob Premium High transaction rates or that use smaller objects or require consistently low storage latency. Page Blob Premium Storing text or binary [...]
Setting Up Development Environments with AWS Cloud9
Welcome to the world of AWS Cloud 9, where seamless development and collaboration meet in the cloud! Whether you're a seasoned developer or just starting your coding journey, Cloud 9 is here to revolutionize the way you build and deploy applications. Imagine having the power to write, run, and debug your code all within a browser-based integrated development environment (IDE). This powerful tool eliminates the need for complex local [...]
Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance Purchasing Option and its Different Payment Terms
In today's fast-paced digital era, businesses rely heavily on cloud computing services to manage their operations efficiently. When it comes to cloud computing, one of the key decisions involves choosing the right instance purchasing options. With various options available, it can be overwhelming to determine the most suitable approach. In this article, we will focus on Reserved Instance purchasing options, payment terms, and significance for business. By the end, [...]
My AWS Certified SYSOPS Administrator – Associate (SOA-C02) Exam Experience
I recently took and passed the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate Exam and wanted to share my experience. This was a challenging yet rewarding journey, and I hope my insights will help those planning to take the same path. About the Exam The AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate ( SOA-C02 ) is consistently among the top paying IT certifications, considering that Amazon Web Services is the leading cloud services platform in the world [...]
VPC Interface Endpoint vs. Gateway Endpoint in AWS
What is a VPC Endpoint? With a VPC endpoint, you can establish a private connection to specific AWS services and VPC endpoint services through AWS PrivateLink. It eliminates the need for public IP addresses for communication between these services and your Amazon VPC instances. Furthermore, a secure connection is maintained since no information leaves the Amazon network while traveling between your Amazon VPC and the service. VPC endpoints are [...]
Switching Your Spot EC2 Instance to a Reserved EC2 Instance
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a cloud computing service that instantly provides flexible and scalable resources to deploy virtual servers, called instances. While Spot Instances can save you a significant amount of money, especially for short-lived workloads, there may come a time when you need a more predictable pricing model. This is where Reserved Instances (RIs) come in handy. In this article, we'll explain the reasons for switching [...]
Microsoft Entra ID
Bookmarks Features Concepts Monitoring Microsoft Entra Directory Security Microsoft Entra ID Cheat Sheet An identity and access management service that helps you access internal and external resources. Microsoft Entra licenses: Free, Premium P1, Premium P2 and Pay as you go Free – user and group management in your on-premises directory Premium P1 – allows access to both on-premises and cloud resources. Premium [...]
Securing Application Logs with Amazon Comprehend
Security is one of the more overlooked aspects that many fall victim to when designing the architecture of applications. Partnering this lack of security priority with the increasing value of personal user data, security breaches become one of the certain ways for companies to lose user trust, face legal charges, and, in the long run, fail. Various governments developed data compliance laws to set minimum guidelines for security in [...]
3 Ways to Fast Track your Cloud Career Journey this 2024
I usually have a countdown to the end of the year (even as early as the 1st quarter of the year) that acts as a timebox for me to track my goal progression or even catch up with the old aspirations until the earth completes yet another revolution around the sun. We may not accomplish 100% of our targets, but if we keep a positive disposition in life [...]
Building a Simple Video Hosting Service using Amazon CloudFront, Amazon S3, and AWS Amplify
Application Use Case The primary purpose of this application is to share a video as a link and have it accessed by viewers with low latency. This feature is great for those who make quick videos, for example, a short demonstration on how to use an application or a group of academics sharing their explanations to mentor their peers. Overview of the Tech Stack Different [...]
Machine Learning Mathematics: Regression Basics
In recent years, of the ever-evolving landscape of technology, a few of the most prominent buzzwords that continue to capture the imagination of innovators and entrepreneurs alike are Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). With the boom of OpenAI’s ChatGPT last November 2023, as well as the many that followed suit, including major tech companies like Meta with their LLaMa model and Google’s PaLM and newly announced Gemini, [...]
Release with a Pipeline: Continuous Delivery to AWS with GitHub Actions
This is the final part of a three-part article about a Web Application Project from building a private infrastructure to building a deployment pipeline using AWS’ cloud-native continuous delivery service AWS CodePipeline, and now finalizing the infrastructure to be accessible in a public domain and building a pipeline for continuous deployment using a third-party CD tool – GitHub Actions. From the private infrastructure previously built, we will update the S3 [...]
Distributed Data Parallel Training with TensorFlow and Amazon SageMaker Distributed Training Library
Introduction In the realm of machine learning, the ability to train models effectively and efficiently stands as a cornerstone of success. As datasets grow exponentially and models become more complex, traditional single-node training methods increasingly fall short. This is where distributed training enters the picture, offering a scalable solution to this growing challenge. Distributed Training Overview Distributed training is a technique used to train machine learning models on large [...]
Securing Machine Learning Pipelines: Best Practices in Amazon SageMaker
Introduction In today's digital era, the importance of security in machine learning (ML) pipelines cannot be overstated. As ML systems increasingly become integral to business operations and decision-making, ensuring the integrity and security of these systems is paramount. A breach or a flaw in an ML pipeline can lead to compromised data, erroneous decision-making, and potentially catastrophic consequences for businesses and individuals alike. This section will delve into why [...]
HTTP Flood Attack Notification using AWS Lambda, Amazon EventBridge and CloudWatch Logs Insights
We can almost do everything now on the website. Selling clothes, ordering food, video posting, doing business meetings, online classes, and others, you name it. Running a website is very awesome and at the same time hard, especially when bad actors want to mess with it. One sneaky way is an "HTTP Flood Attack," where your website gets bombarded with too many requests. This can slow down or even [...]
Training an Image Classification Model with TensorFlow in Amazon SageMaker
Introduction In today's digital age, where data is as vital as currency, the power of Machine Learning (ML) in transforming industries is undeniable. From self-driving cars to personalized medicine, ML models are at the heart of many technological breakthroughs. Among the various tools and frameworks available for ML, TensorFlow has emerged as a leader, renowned for its versatility and scalability. This article aims to demystify the process of training [...]
NEW Product Release: All-in-Access: Courses + PlayCloud Sandbox (AWS) & Play Sandbox (AWS)
Brace yourselves for a journey into the cutting-edge realms of tech and education! We're thrilled to announce not one but two incredible products designed to supercharge your learning experience and bring your skills to new heights! 🚀 Get ready to dive into innovation with our super-focused PlayCloud Sandbox (AWS) and All-in-Access: Courses + PlayCloud Sandbox (AWS). Let's explore why these releases are set to revolutionize your learning journey. PlayCloud Sandbox (AWS) [...]
Building a Deployment Pipeline for a React Application with AWS CodePipeline
This is the second part of a series of blogs about the platform management of a React Application infrastructure by adding a continuous deployment component to the earlier infrastructure. In an earlier article, I wrote about how a private react application infrastructure can be deployed with Terraform code. Now, we will explore this further by building a deployment pipeline using AWS CodePipeline. Let's assume that the source code of [...]
Train and Deploy a Scikit-Learn Model in Amazon SageMaker
Introduction In the ever-evolving world of machine learning (ML), the ability to efficiently train and deploy models is crucial for turning innovative ideas into real-world applications. This is where Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service that provides every developer and data scientist with the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly, stands out. Amazon SageMaker streamlines the machine learning workflow, offering a broad set of capabilities [...]
Securing LLMs with Guardrails for Amazon Bedrock
One of the pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework is security. It is a foundational concept when running your workloads in the cloud to think about privacy, access limits, compliance with regulatory requirements, and data protection; and this includes Amazon Bedrock. Along with several AI announcements during the keynote of AWS CEO, Adam Selipsky during AWS re:Invent 2023 was Guardrails for Amazon Bedrock. As AI technology evolves and becomes [...]
Building a Private React Application Infrastructure with Terraform
This is the first part of a series of blogs about the platform management of a React Application infrastructure using Terraform. In the early phases of a software development project, it is mandatory to have the application reviewed by security way before the Beta release to ensure that the app adheres to the standards of a secure web application and is able to protect the sensitive data it handles. [...]
How to Install and Configure PHP OpCache with Web Viewer on Ubuntu 20.04
The performance of your PHP applications can be significantly enhanced by using OpCache, a PHP opcode cache. OpCache reduces the need to recompile your PHP scripts on each request by storing the generated bytecode in memory, resulting in quicker execution rates and lessened server load. Image retrieved from https://www.pinterest.ph/pin/flash-running-poster-custom-posters-design-your-own-wall-art-create-personalized-prints--792281759458556733/ This article will walk you through installing and configuring PHP OpCache with Web Viewer on Ubuntu 20.04. Install OpCache Install [...]
Deploying a Serverless Inference Endpoint with Amazon SageMaker
Introduction Welcome to our deep dive into the world of serverless machine learning (ML) inference using Amazon SageMaker. In this blog post, we will explore the innovative and efficient approach of deploying ML models without the need for managing servers, a method known as serverless inference. What is Serverless Inference? Serverless inference is a cloud computing execution model where the cloud provider dynamically manages the allocation of machine resources. [...]
My AWS Certified Data Engineer Associate DEA-C01 BETA Exam Experience
I recently took the beta exam of the AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate DEA-C01 online, and from the get-go, I can see its resemblance to the AWS Certified Data Analytics Specialty test, albeit not entirely the same in terms of depth. This new Associate-level exam aims to validate the skills and knowledge of IT Professionals in core data-related AWS services, such as the ability to implement data pipelines, [...]
Adding SSL to WordPress Website with Let’s Encrypt
With the rapid advancement of technology today, it is undeniable that this has resulted in a higher number of cyber-attacks, calling every website owner to strengthen their preemptive measure to protect and have robust security for their website and its users. One essential way of boosting website security is by obtaining an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate. This article will explore the reasons and benefits of adding an SSL [...]
Setting Up AWS EventBridge for Cross-Region IAM Event Notifications
AWS EventBridge is a serverless event bus service that simplifies event-driven architectures. In this guide, we'll explore how to leverage EventBridge with a cross-region event bus to overcome the regional limitations associated with IAM (Identity and Access Management) events. This setup will enable you to capture and respond to IAM events seamlessly across AWS regions. Use Case: Cross-Region IAM Event Notifications with AWS EventBridge AWS CloudWatch Events are powerful, [...]
Mastering AWS CDK Part 2: Leveraging Custom Constructs
In the previous article, we delved into the fundamentals of AWS CDK, focusing on leveraging AWS's pre-built constructs. We examined a straightforward Serverless REST API architecture, which integrates three primary serverless services from AWS. These include Amazon API Gateway as the REST API's access point, AWS Lambda for computing, and Amazon DynamoDB for data storage. The Fat Lambda In contrast to the basic architecture previously discussed, it's important to [...]
Amazon Kendra
Bookmarks Features Benefits Use Cases Document Types and Formats Supported Data Sources Querying Data Use of Tags Pricing Amazon Kendra Cheat Sheet Amazon Kendra is a highly scalable, intelligent enterprise search service. It utilizes machine learning to search unstructured data and improve accuracy in search results. It’s tightly integrated with other AWS services, such as Amazon S3 and [...]
Amazon Bedrock
Bookmarks Key Features Additional Capabilities Pricing Amazon Bedrock Cheat Sheet Amazon Bedrock enables you to construct and expand applications powered by generative AI. These applications have the capability to produce text, images, audio, and artificial data in reaction to specific prompts. Key Features Model Choice: Amazon Bedrock provides access to a variety of high-performing foundation models from leading AI companies such as AI21 [...]
AWS Billing Conductor
Bookmarks Key Features Benefits Pricing AWS Billing Conductor Cheat Sheet Facilitates showback and chargeback workflows for AWS Solution Providers and Enterprise customers. Enables customization of an alternative monthly billing data version. Models your billing relationship with customers or business units. Maintains your existing AWS billing method. Allows configuration, generation, and display of rates to specific customers over a billing period. Supports analysis of [...]
AWS Device Farm
Bookmarks Key Features Terminology Availability Device Selection Test Types Test Reports Pricing Security Reference AWS Device Farm Cheat Sheet AWS Device Farm allows you to examine and interact with your Android, iOS, and web applications on actual, physical devices maintained by Amazon Web Services (AWS). Key Features Automated App Testing - Device Farm provides the functionality to [...]
AWS AppConfig
Bookmarks Key Features Benefits Use Cases Pricing Reference AWS AppConfig Cheat Sheet AWS AppConfig allows software developers to quickly and securely adjust application behavior in production environments without needing to deploy code. It enhances the frequency of software releases, improves application resilience, and enables rapid response to emergent issues. Key Features Feature Flags: Allows gradual release of new capabilities to users [...]
AWS Well-Architected Tool
Bookmarks Key Components Using the Tool Best Practices Benefits Reference AWS Well-Architected Tool Cheat Sheet The AWS Well-Architected Tool is a service that helps you review your workloads and compares them to the latest AWS architectural best practices. The tool provides recommendations for making your workloads more reliable, secure, efficient, and cost-effective. Key Components Workload is a term used to describe [...]
In-Place Querying in AWS
When you look at the Gartner magic quadrant of cloud service providers, AWS is still the leader and the leading visionary of the cloud computing space. It offers an array of services that empower companies and organizations to manage and analyze massive sets of data with unprecedented agility. At the core of this revolution, “In-place querying” is a technique pioneered by AWS that is reshaping how data is processed [...]
Batch Data Ingestion Simplified in AWS
Today's tech industry is dominated by Big Data and Cloud Computing. It is crucial for companies and organizations to efficiently manage large volumes of data. To address this important need, AWS offers robust solutions for handling these chunks of large data, particularly through batch data ingestion. This process involves collecting and importing bulk or big data into storage or other processing systems at regular intervals or specific events. Batch [...]
Data Ingestion in AWS: Handling Homogenous and Heterogenous Data
The phrase "data is the new oil" or "data is the new gold" may sound like a cliche, but it captures the fact that data is a critical asset for modern businesses. Companies have long used data to inform strategic decisions, especially in today's tech industry. Many organizations now build dedicated data analytics teams to harness information gathered from various sources. Yet, for an average Joe, the process of [...]
Generative AI and Reinventing with Amazon Q
The Journey to Amazon Q AWS re:Invent 2023 recently concluded, and there has been some exciting news around data, infrastructure, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. One of the big announcements was Amazon Q, currently under Preview release. Amazon Q is a generative artificial intelligence (AI) powered conversational assistant. Announced during the keynote by AWS CEO Adam Selipsky, he spoke about various things that AWS is doing to support its [...]
Building Code-Free GenerativeAI Apps with PartyRock
What is PartyRock? It has been two weeks since Amazon announced PartyRock, an Amazon Bedrock Playground. It comes with the tagline “Everyone can build AI apps”. According to Amazon President and CEO, Andy Jassy, it was just an internal tool created by AWS developers to experiment with Foundation Models from Amazon Bedrock. The name PartyRock was in reference to it being a fun and collaborative way to experience Amazon [...]
How I Prepared for the AWS Cloud Practitioner CLF-C02 Exam as a Data Scientist
In the ever-evolving landscape of technology, the pursuit of knowledge and skills is not just a choice but a necessity, especially for professionals like data scientists. This realization led me to embark on a journey towards achieving the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner CLF-C02 certification, a decision that not only expanded my technical horizons but also underscored the importance of continuous learning in the tech industry. As a data scientist, [...]
Amazon AI Fairness and Explainability with Amazon SageMaker Clarify
Introduction In the rapidly evolving domain of machine learning, ensuring fairness and explainability in model predictions has become crucial. With Amazon SageMaker Clarify, these critical aspects are not just an afterthought but integral components of the model development and deployment process. This article delves into the world of SageMaker Clarify, offering a comprehensive guide to its capabilities and practical applications. We commence our journey with a high-level understanding of [...]
The AI Revolution: An Overview of Generative AI and Foundation Models
The recent biggest trends in technology revolve around this buzzword that exploded in popularity: Generative AI. After the initial public release of ChatGPT from OpenAI around November 2022, plenty of other chatbots powered by large language models (LLMs), like Google’s PaLM powering Google Bard and Meta’s LLaMa model, took the world by storm. These LLMs have empowered millions of users and developers, affecting various areas of work and thus [...]
Personal ML Projects with Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Comprehend, Amazon Forecast and Other ML Services
Machine learning and artificial intelligence have been powering many of the technologies we use daily, some of which we may not actively pay attention to, and they have become second nature to us. Suppose we actively look for the presence of ML/AI. In that case, we can find them everywhere: natural language processing in our AI Assistants, recommender engines in e-commerce, social media, and music, and fraud detection in [...]
Automating Binary Classification Model Building with Amazon SageMaker Autopilot
Introduction In the ever-evolving world of machine learning, binary classification stands out as one of the most fundamental and widely used techniques. At its core, binary classification involves categorizing data into one of two groups based on certain features. This method is crucial in various applications, such as spam detection, medical diagnosis, and customer churn prediction. However, building an effective binary classification model can be a complex and time-consuming [...]
Leveraging Amazon CloudFront with S3 and Route 53 for Subdomain Configuration
Amazon S3 and Route 53, both provided by AWS, offer a comprehensive solution for managing and deploying web content. Route 53 allows you to create alias records that direct to the website endpoint of your S3 bucket. Meanwhile, Amazon S3 is a robust service for hosting static websites. These services, when used together, provide a powerful toolset for web content management. However, there's a key requirement when using these [...]
How AWS IQ Works
AWS offers a lot of platforms to meet various needs of businesses, which will help them grow and succeed. Now, some companies must complete a project, follow timelines and requirements, encounter challenges to specific services, and need help moving forward. Here comes AWS IQ, provided by Amazon Web Services, wherein customers and certified experts engage, offering support in different perspectives, services, and domains. This platform will be a great [...]
Setting up a Static Website on Amazon S3
What is Amazon S3? Amazon S3, a scalable and secure object storage service, offers an efficient and cost-effective way to host static websites. In this article, I will guide you through a step-by-step process of setting up a static website on Amazon S3. Whether you're an experienced developer or a beginner just starting out, this guide will equip you with the knowledge and tools you need to launch your [...]
Serverless Synergy: Building a Full-stack Serverless Application with Sentiment Analysis from Image Capabilities with the AWS Suite
Plenty of full-stack web applications are scattered across the internet nowadays, with varying tech stacks and services utilized to serve their varying purposes. Like with other technologies, as popularity increases, so does the surrounding ecosystem, which manifests in significant improvements in the development cycle. In this article, we will discuss how to build a simple but purposeful, full-stack web application using multiple features of Amazon Web Services. We will [...]
A Compact Guide to Building Your First DAG with Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow
In the vast realm of data processing, orchestrating workflows becomes crucial to ensure tasks run efficiently and reliably. Apache Airflow has revolutionized this aspect, providing a flexible platform to define, schedule, and monitor workflows. Combining this with Amazon's managed service, we can supercharge our workflow setup without the overhead of manual maintenance. In this guide, we dive deep into constructing your first Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) using Apache Airflow, [...]
Serverless Model Deployment in AWS: Streamlining with Lambda, Docker, and S3
Welcome back to our series on model deployment in AWS! In the fast-paced world of machine learning and data science, the ability to deploy models efficiently and reliably is crucial. This is where AWS services, with their vast array of tools and capabilities, come into play. In this second installment, we will delve into the potent combination of AWS Lambda and Docker, coupled with the convenience of storing models [...]
Deploying a Trained CTGAN Model on an EC2 Instance: A Step-by-Step Guide
Welcome to the first entry in our series on deploying machine learning models in AWS. As cloud computing and machine learning continue to evolve and intersect, understanding the dynamics of deployment becomes invaluable. Whether you're an enthusiast, a budding data scientist, or a seasoned professional, the insights offered by this series are tailored to empower you to make the most of AWS's vast ecosystem. One recurrent pitfall in the [...]
Migrating from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4
You can observe how users interact with your websites and online products using Google Analytics, which tracks users across all your websites and apps. The data collected contains the web pages your customers access and their activities, which include taps, scrolls, purchases, and other consumer actions. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) has replaced the old Universal Analytics as of June 2023. This transition means that post-June 2023, you'll be using [...]
Setting Up Redirects on Amazon S3 for a Custom Domain Registered with Amazon Route 53
This article will guide you on creating redirects on Amazon S3 for a website with a custom domain registered with Amazon Route 53. The following services will be used: Amazon Route 53 for domain registration and routing internet traffic, Amazon S3 for bucket creation, uploading a redirection script, configuring permissions for public access, and configuring the buckets for website hosting. In this example, we will redirect a custom domain [...]
Mastering AWS CDK Part 1: Using Built-In Constructs for Serverless APIs
In the realm of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) within AWS, CloudFormation stands out as the foundational service. Many other IaC solutions, whether it's the Serverless Framework, AWS SAM, or even Terraform, ultimately get translated into CloudFormation. Additionally, the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) has emerged as a distinct player in this space. What sets AWS CDK apart is its embrace of familiar programming languages. Instead of relying on YAML [...]
AWS CloudShell
Bookmarks Features Security Pricing AWS CloudShell Cheat Sheet A terminal that you can access from the AWS Management Console to interact with your AWS resources without installing any software on your local computer. To run AWS CLI commands, you can use any command-line interpreter: Bash (bash) PowerShell (pwsh) Z shell (zsh) The compute environment is built on Amazon Linux 2. 1 vCPU 2 [...]
Cloud Native: The Future of Application Development
If you could do a quick search on the definition of cloud native, chances are you would be confused by the amount of different sources with varying definitions. The term "cloud native" has become a buzzword within the tech industry, symbolizing a paradigm shift in how software applications are designed, developed, and deployed. But what exactly does cloud native mean? The varying definitions of cloud native may be primarily [...]
Azure vs AWS vs GCP Service Comparison
In the dynamic landscape of cloud computing, Microsoft's Azure stands as a pivotal player, offering myriad services that cater to businesses of all sizes and sectors. Azure's commitment to flexibility, scalability, and reliability is evident in its expansive toolset, allowing for seamless application development, management, and deployment across its vast global network of data centers. What's particularly intriguing is that one can find a corresponding or equivalent service within [...]
Creating a Slack Notification for Redis Errors with Lambda Function and CloudWatch Logs Integration
As more companies turn to cloud solutions, monitoring and notification systems for errors are becoming increasingly crucial. Redis, an open-source, fast, in-memory key-value data store, is now a widely used solution for databases, cache, message brokers, and queues. However, like any software, Redis may experience errors that require immediate attention. This article will guide you through setting up an automated Slack Notification using Lambda Function and CloudWatch Logs Integration [...]
Introduction to Kubernetes
Containerization has set the gold standard for deploying applications on both on-premises and cloud environments. As microservices architecture becomes more popular, people increasingly embrace containerization because it naturally fits this architectural approach. Containerization brings many advantages: It guarantees portability. This technology's inherent isolation lets developers deploy their application code on various environments and operating systems without worrying about compatibility. It boosts scalability. Developers can deploy containers quickly and repeatedly. [...]
Amazon MemoryDB for Redis
Bookmarks Features Concepts Security Networking Pricing Amazon MemoryDB for Redis Cheat Sheet An in-memory database service for microservices-based applications. MemoryDB stores all of your data in memory, allowing you to achieve microsecond read and single-digit millisecond write latency and high throughput. It also uses a Multi-AZ transactional log to store data across multiple AZs in order to enable fast failover, database [...]
AWS Certified Data Engineer Associate Exam – DEA-C01 Study Path
Bookmarks AWS Certified Data Engineer Associate DEA-C01 Exam Domains AWS Certified Data Engineer Associate DEA-C01 Exam Topic Is taking the AWS Certified Data Engineer Associate DEA-C01 Beta Exam worth it? Learn about the AWS Certified Data Engineer Associate Exam Topics The AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate (DEA-C01) certification exam evaluates a candidate's ability to implement data pipelines and address performance and [...]
Route Analyzer vs. Reachability Analyzer vs. Network Access Analyzer
Introduction In network management and security, it is very important to understand how data flows within your network. Fortunately, AWS gave us three essential tools to help with this realm: Route Analyzers, Reachability Analyzers, and Network Accessibility Analyzers. Each of these tools has a unique purpose that we can use in dissecting and optimizing our network infrastructure. In this article, we will delve into the differences between these analyzers, [...]
Navigating DNS Management: Unveiling Amazon Route 53 Inbound and Outbound Resolver Endpoints
The DNS, or Domain Name System, forms the backbone of internet communication, translating user-friendly domain names into IP addresses that computers use to locate resources online. Amazon Route 53 Resolver is a service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that allows you to manage DNS (Domain Name System) resolution within your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and connect your VPC to on-premises networks. Amazon Route 53 Resolver enables DNS [...]
AWS Data Exchange
Bookmarks Concepts Security Pricing AWS Data Exchange Cheat Sheet A service that enables users to search, subscribe to, and use third-party data in the cloud. Provides a central catalog where data providers may publish their data products, and data subscribers can search and subscribe to them. You can also find and use publicly available data sets that are part of the Open Data [...]
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam Guide Study Path CLF-C02
Bookmarks What to Review What AWS services are included How to Review Common Exam Scenarios Validate Your Knowledge What to expect from the exam Final Exam Tips The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner CLF-C02 exam or AWS CCP is the easiest to achieve among all the AWS certification exams. This certification covers most if not all, fundamental knowledge that [...]
Maximizing Startup Success: The Serverless Revolution
Even though the pandemic was largely perceived in a negative light, it led to the emergence of many groundbreaking tech startups. As layoffs, furloughs, and business shutdowns became commonplace, individuals turned to entrepreneurship, launching a multitude of small businesses. Data from the US Census Bureau indicates an impressive 24.3% surge in new business applications between 2019 and 2020, totaling 4.5 million by the end of 2020. Thanks to the [...]
Is An Azure Certification Still Worth It in 2023?
In the dynamic world of technology, the constant evolution of tools, platforms, and skill sets can often make professionals question the relevance and value of particular certifications. One such credential that has gained immense popularity over the years is the Azure certification from Microsoft, and with the shelf life of many skills now less than half a decade, continuous learning and upskilling are crucial. As the need for cloud [...]
AWS Cloud Adoption Framework – AWS CAF
Bookmarks What is the Cloud Adoption Framework? The Perspectives of the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework Capabilities of AWS CAF AWS CAF Use Cases Benefits of Using AWS CAF What is the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework? The AWS Cloud Adoption Framework, or AWS CAF for short, is simply a framework provided by AWS to assist you in adopting [...]
AI-900 Microsoft Azure AI Fundamentals Sample Exam Questions
Here are 10 AI-900 Microsoft Azure AI Fundamentals practice exam questions to help you gauge your readiness for the actual exam. Question 1 Match the relevant Microsoft guiding principles for responsible AI with their appropriate descriptions. Instructions: To answer, drag the appropriate item from the column on the left to its description on the right. Each correct match is worth one point. Correct Answer: Accountability: Establishing procedures to [...]
Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate (KCNA) Sample Exam Questions
Here are 10 Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate (KCNA) practice exam questions to help you gauge your readiness for the actual exam. Question 1 What is the smallest deployable unit of computing that you can create and manage in Kubernetes? Container kubelet Node Pod Correct Answer: 4 Pods are the smallest deployable units of computing that you can create and manage in Kubernetes. It is similar to a set [...]
AZ-305 Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions Sample Exam Questions
Here are 10 AZ-305 Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions practice exam questions to help you gauge your readiness for the actual exam. Question 1 You have an application named Manila running on an Azure virtual machine scale set. The data used by the application is stored in a SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines. The application is not used 24/7. You need to recommend a disaster recovery solution for [...]
Kubernetes Workload Resources
Bookmarks Defining a Kubernetes Workload Resource Deployments ReplicaSet StatefulSets DaemonSet* Jobs CronJob Automatic Cleanup for Finished Jobs ReplicationController A workload is an application that can have one or more components running on Kubernetes. A Pod represents a set of running containers in the cluster. Kubernetes allows for declarative configuration of workloads and its components. This will allow [...]
Kubernetes Services
Bookmarks What is a Pod? What are Kubernetes Services? Kubernetes Service Types Defining a Service Headless Service What is a Pod? A Pod is a Kubernetes Object that has one or more containers running inside it. A Pod will ensure that the containers inside it share the same resources and local network. Each Pod gets its own IP address. If you [...]
Kubernetes Objects
Bookmarks Object Names and IDs Kubernetes Object Management Labels and Selectors Namespaces Annotations Field Selectors Owners and Dependents Finalizers Kubernetes Objects represent the desired state of the cluster and are created by configuration. These objects can be created, modified, or deleted via the Kubernetes API. Kubernetes Objects describes the following: ● what containerized applications [...]
Kubernetes Components
Bookmarks What are Kubernetes Components? Control Plane Components Node Components Kubernetes Add-Ons What are Kubernetes Components? There are two main components to Kubernetes: Cluster and Control Plane. When deploying Kubernetes, at least one cluster will be created. A cluster contains the following components: ● Nodes. ○ Worker machines that runs containerized applications. ○ Every cluster will have at least one node. ○ [...]
Kubernetes Fundamentals
Bookmarks Fundamental Terminologies What is Kubernetes? Origin of Kubernetes name Deployment without Kubernetes Deployment with Virtualization Deployment with Container via Kubernetes What are Containers? Kubernetes and Docker Benefits of using Kubernetes Fundamental terminologies Containers - a lightweight, standalone, and executable package that can hold a workload. Workload - an application. This can be a single component or [...]
Managing AWS Organizations and Accounts with AWS Control Tower
Introduction As organizations embrace the power of the cloud and scale their operations on Amazon Web Services (AWS), managing multiple AWS accounts can become a complex and daunting task. Challenges such as decentralized governance, inconsistent security controls, and manual provisioning processes can hinder an organization's ability to harness the full potential of AWS. To address these issues, AWS Control Tower steps in as a comprehensive solution that streamlines multi-account [...]
Customizing Your AWS Control Tower Landing Zone
AWS Control Tower is an AWS solution that simplifies the management of multi-account AWS installations. Although it provides default configurations to create a landing zone, customizing it is still essential to meet specific organizational requirements. Organizations can tailor access controls, organizational structures, and resource provisioning processes. This article explores different ways to customize the landing zone, enabling organizations to optimize the benefits of AWS Control Tower and create a [...]
AZ-305 Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Expert Exam Study Path
Bookmarks Study Materials Azure Services to Focus On Validate Your Knowledge Final Remarks The AZ-305 Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Expert certification is designed for experienced professionals who can design, implement, and manage Microsoft Azure solutions. The exam tests your skills in designing and implementing solutions for a variety of business needs, including scalability, security, and compliance. Prior experience in infrastructure management is [...]
Managing AWS Costs with AWS Budgets and Credits
Cloud services like Amazon Web Services (AWS) have become widely recognized and necessary for businesses of all sizes. However, with the convenience and flexibility of AWS come the potential challenges of managing costs effectively. It can be daunting to manage AWS costs, particularly when you have a lot of resources running in your account. Nonetheless, there is a way to help with this concern by working your AWS Costs [...]
Cloudfront Function URL Demo
In this article, we will guide you through the process of setting up a CloudFront Function for your CloudFront distribution. We'll walk you through a scenario where we use CloudFront Functions to redirect users to different content based on their device type. By the end of this guide, you'll gain a clear understanding of how CloudFront Functions can benefit your specific use case. Creating an S3 Bucket This bucket [...]
Data Concepts in Azure Machine Learning
Azure Machine Learning Data Concepts URI A Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) represents a storage location on a local computer, Azure storage, or a publicly available http(s) location. URIs can be used as inputs or outputs to an Azure Machine Learning job and can be mapped to the compute target filesystem in different modes: read-only mount, read-write mount, download, or upload. URIs use identity-based authentication to connect to storage services, [...]
NEW Practice Test Sampler – AZ-305 Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions
Are you preparing to take the AZ-305 Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions exam and are looking for free materials or resources that will help you pass and become certified? Good news! It is with absolute delight that we announce the release of our NEW Practice Test Sampler- AZ-305 Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions. The AZ-305 Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions exam will test your subject matter expertise in implementing, [...]
AWS Lambda Response Streaming Demo
Introduction Response streaming is a new invocation method that enables your functions to progressively stream response payloads back to the clients. Instead of waiting for the entire data to be ready, your applications can now receive chunks of data as soon as they become available. This means faster loading times and a more responsive user experience. Response Streaming vs. Non-Streaming (Buffering) To quickly get an idea of how it [...]
CloudFront Function URL
Introduction CloudFront Functions is a feature of Amazon CloudFront that enables developers to deploy and run lightweight JavaScript functions at AWS’s global edge locations closer to the end-users. This functionality facilitates high scalability and low latency and simplifies operations by allowing developers to run code that customizes the content delivered through CloudFront. When to Use CloudFront Functions? CloudFront Functions is ideal for simple tasks requiring high request rates and [...]
My SAA-C03 AWS Certified Solution Architect Associate Exam Experience 2023
Getting certified is an essential milestone for IT professionals for career advancement in today's competitive industry. The AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA-C03) is one such certification. In this article, I will share my SAA-C03 exam experience, highlighting my challenges, overcoming setbacks, and the lessons I learned, including the various SAA-C03 exam topics I encountered. Basically, the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate certification test is an Associate-level [...]
Building Serverless APIs with AWS API Gateway and AWS Lambda
Are you looking to create robust and scalable APIs without dealing with infrastructure management? In this article, we'll look at how to use AWS Lambda and AWS API Gateway to create serverless APIs. You may build APIs that automatically grow, are simple to manage, and offer a seamless user experience by using these services. Your APIs' front door is AWS API Gateway, and AWS Lambda handles the backend computation. [...]
Lightning-Fast Static Website with Amazon S3 and CloudFront with Origin Access Control (OAC)
Harnessing the power of Amazon S3 and CloudFront, with the added advantage of Origin Access Control (OAC), offers many benefits for hosting a static website. With Amazon S3's reliable and scalable storage, with CloudFront's global content delivery network, a website can provide lightning-fast access to users worldwide. Implementing OAC adds an essential layer of security that prevents direct access to the S3 bucket, mitigating potential security risks. OAC is [...]
Redacting PIIs Using S3 Object Lambda
The Challenge Data privacy is a top priority for businesses, especially amid the rising global data regulations. One common challenge is ensuring sensitive data, like personally identifiable information (PII), remains protected when data is accessed or transferred. Imagine you have a bunch of employee profiles stored as CSV files in an S3 bucket. These profiles include sensitive information such as real names, social security numbers, and email addresses, along [...]
Azure Applied AI Services: Computer Vision and NLP Workloads on Azure
Computer Vision on Azure involves the use of Azure AI Services and related tools to analyze and understand visual content, such as images and videos. The goal is to enable computers to interpret and extract valuable information from visual data. Computer Vision Workloads on Azure: Azure AI Services Azure AI Services that analyzes and understands images and videos. It provides features like object detection, image recognition, image tagging, and [...]
Google Certified Associate Cloud Engineer (ACE) Sample Exam Questions
Here are 10 Google Certified Associate Cloud Engineer (ACE) practice exam questions to help you gauge your readiness for the actual exam. Question 1 Your company’s finance team needs to back up data on a Cloud Storage bucket for disaster recovery purposes. You want to comply with Google’s recommended practices in implementing the solution for this task. Which storage class do you think would be the best option? Multi-Regional [...]
AWS Certified Machine Learning Specialty MLS-C01 Sample Exam Questions
Here are 10 AWS Certified Machine Learning Specialty MLS-C01 practice exam questions to help you gauge your readiness for the actual exam. Question 1 A trucking company wants to improve situational awareness for its operations team. Each truck has GPS devices installed to monitor their locations. The company requires to have the data stored in Amazon Redshift to conduct near real-time analytics, which will then be used to generate [...]
AWS Certified Advanced Networking Specialty ANS-C01 Sample Exam Questions
Here are 10 AWS Certified Advanced Networking Specialty ANS-C01 practice exam questions to help you gauge your readiness for the actual exam. Question 1 A company is building its customer web portal in multiple EC2 instances behind an Application Load Balancer. The portal must be accessible on www.tutorialsdojo.com as well as on its tutorialsdojo.com root domain. How should the Network Engineer set up Amazon Route 53 to satisfy this [...]
AZ-104 Microsoft Azure Administrator Sample Exam Questions
Here are 10 AZ-104 Microsoft Azure Administrator practice exam questions to help you gauge your readiness for the actual exam. Question 1 Your company has an Azure Storage account named TutorialsDojo1. You have to copy your files hosted on your on-premises network to TutorialsDojo1 using AzCopy. What Azure Storage services will you be able to copy your data into? Table and Queue only Blob, Table, and File only Blob, [...]
AWS Certified Security Specialty SCS-C02 Sample Exam Questions
Here are 10 AWS Certified Security Specialty SCS-C02 practice exam questions to help you gauge your readiness for the actual exam. Question 1 A leading hospital has a web application hosted in AWS that will store sensitive Personally Identifiable Information (PII) of its patients in an Amazon S3 bucket. Both the master keys and the unencrypted data should never be sent to AWS to comply with the strict compliance [...]
AZ-900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals Sample Exam Questions
Here are 10 AZ-900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals practice exam questions to help you gauge your readiness for the actual exam. Question 1 A company is planning to deploy its suite of enterprise applications to Microsoft Azure, where each application has several dependencies and subcomponents. The company must also control and manage the patching activities of the underlying operating system of the servers. What type of cloud deployment solution should [...]
AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional DOP-C02 Sample Exam Questions
Here are 10 AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional DOP-C02 practice exam questions to help you gauge your readiness for the actual exam. Question 1 An application is hosted in an Auto Scaling group of Amazon EC2 instances with public IP addresses in a public subnet. The instances are configured with a user data script which fetch and install the required system dependencies of the application from the Internet upon [...]
AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional SAP-C02 Sample Exam Questions
Here are 10 AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional SAP-C02 practice exam questions to help you gauge your readiness for the actual exam. Question 1 A data analytics startup has been chosen to develop a data analytics system that will track all statistics in the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup, which will also be used by other 3rd-party analytics sites. The system will record, store and provide [...]
AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate SOA-C02 Sample Exam Questions
Here are 10 AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate SOA-C02 practice exam questions to help you gauge your readiness for the actual exam. Question 1 A financial start-up has recently adopted a hybrid cloud infrastructure with AWS Cloud. They are planning to migrate their online payments system that supports an IPv6 address and uses an Oracle database in a RAC configuration. As the AWS Consultant, you have to make sure [...]
AWS Certified Developer Associate DVA-C02 Sample Exam Questions
Here are 10 AWS Certified Developer Associate DVA-C02 practice exam questions to help you gauge your readiness for the actual exam. Question 1 A programmer is developing a Node.js application that will be run on a Linux server in their on-premises data center. The application will access various AWS services such as S3, DynamoDB, and ElastiCache using the AWS SDK. Which of the following is the MOST suitable way [...]
AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate SAA-C03 Sample Exam Questions
Here are 10 AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate SAA-C03 practice exam questions to help you gauge your readiness for the actual exam. Question 1 A tech company has a CRM application hosted on an Auto Scaling group of On-Demand EC2 instances with different instance types and sizes. The application is extensively used during office hours from 9 in the morning to 5 in the afternoon. Their users are complaining [...]
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner CLF-C02 Sample Exam Questions
Here are 10 AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner CLF-C02 practice exam questions to help you gauge your readiness for the actual exam. Question 1 Which of the following channels shares a collection of offerings to help you achieve specific business outcomes related to enterprise cloud adoption through paid engagements in several specialty practice areas? AWS Enterprise Support Concierge Support AWS Professional Services AWS Technical Account Manager Correct Answer: 3 [...]
NEW AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner CLF-C02 Exam Version in 2023
Heads up! After nearly six years since its pilot release, the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner CLF-C01 exam is undergoing a long-awaited revamp. The AWS Training and Certification team is introducing a fresh and updated version of the exam, which, naturally, will be called the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner CLF-C02 exam. The last date that you can take the CLF-C01 exam version is on September 18, 2023. Meanwhile, you can [...]
AWS IoT Core
AWS IoT (Internet of Things) Core It is a managed cloud service that connects IoT devices to other devices and AWS cloud services easily. It can support billions of devices and routes trillions of messages to AWS services without managing an infrastructure securely and reliably. It offers connectivity between devices and the AWS cloud, continuous processing of data sent from connected devices and [...]
Managing Non-EC2 Servers using AWS Systems Manager
Introduction AWS Systems Manager is like a Swiss army knife for your cloud infrastructure, bundling a wide range of features into a single service. You can use it to effectively manage not only your entire AWS ecosystem but also extends its capabilities to your on-premises infrastructure. Here's a quick rundown of what it offers: Operations Management: AWS Systems Manager collects and aggregates operational data, offering you insights for understanding [...]
Setting Up AWS Billing Alerts on Slack
Introduction Let's first get familiar with the AWS Cost Explorer. It's essentially a dedicated financial advisor for your AWS expenses, helping you make sense of where your spending goes. With an easy-to-use interface, AWS Cost Explorer provides detailed visual analytics of your past, present, and predicted AWS usage and costs. Why Slack for AWS bill? We've all been there, trying to stay on top of our monthly bills. [...]
Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) in Azure
Automated machine learning, known as automated ML or AutoML, streamlines the tasks involved in developing machine learning models by automating repetitive tasks. Azure Machine Learning provides the Python SDK, allowing you to leverage the power of AutoML. Applications of AutoML It simplifies the machine learning model development process, allowing users to implement ML solutions without extensive programming knowledge. Classification Identifies data points into categorical labels Precision is the ratio [...]
Securing Your Repositories with AWS CodeGuru: How Machine Learning Can Improve Your Code Quality and Security
Ensuring code quality and security is of utmost importance in the ever-evolving field of software development. However, traditional code review practices can be time-consuming and prone to errors, often resulting in overlooked vulnerabilities. Fortunately, the combination of machine learning (ML) and cloud computing has given rise to innovative solutions like AWS CodeGuru, empowering developers to significantly improve code quality and security. This article explores the capabilities of AWS CodeGuru [...]
Enhance Your Security Posture: Configure SNS Notifications for AWS Secrets Manager Rotation Events
In the ever-changing digital landscape, maintaining robust security measures is crucial for businesses utilizing cloud services like Amazon Web Services (AWS). As the significance of secure data storage grows, it becomes essential to prioritize the management and regular rotation of sensitive information. AWS Secret Manager offers a secure solution for storing and rotating secrets, and by configuring Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) notifications for Secrets Manager rotation events, organizations [...]
Azure Responsible AI
Azure Responsible AI Cheat Sheet Microsoft outlines six key principles for responsible AI: accountability, inclusiveness, reliability and safety, fairness, transparency, and privacy and security. Accountability People designing and deploying AI systems need to be accountable for their actions and decisions. Internal review bodies can provide oversight and guidance in AI systems. Considers the systems' impact and integrating ethical considerations into their development Inclusiveness AI should consider all human races [...]
Azure 101: Azure Resource Manager and ARM Templates
Azure Resource Manager (ARM) is a game-changer for users managing resources in Microsoft's Azure cloud services platform. A unified management layer provides a consistent way to create, update, and delete resources within Azure. Before Azure resource deployment, Azure classic was the deployment model. In the old approach, managing a solution required individually tracking resources and deploying them manually or via scripted sequences. Deleting a solution also meant removing each [...]
Efficient Log Monitoring: Filter CloudWatch Logs with Metric Filters and Get SNS Notifications
Monitoring logs efficiently is essential in today's fast-paced and data-centric world, especially for cloud-based applications and services. Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a robust solution called CloudWatch Logs, which enables centralized log monitoring, analysis, and management. One of the key functionalities of CloudWatch Logs is the ability to filter logs effectively using metric filters and receive notifications through Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS). This combination empowers users to streamline [...]
Adding Logs Insights Queries To Your CloudWatch Dashboard
Introduction Widgets are the building blocks of a CloudWatch dashboard. They come in various types that can help you interpret metrics in a way that's not only meaningful but also tailored to your specific needs. While they are typically used for visualizing metrics, widgets can also display the results of Logs Insights queries on your dashboard. Logs Insights queries as a checklist You can save Logs Insights queries to [...]
Cost Allocation Tags on Amazon S3 Buckets and Using AWS Cost Explorer
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is one of the most popular cloud-based storage solutions by AWS. Amazon S3 offers flexibility for various applications and is widely used across multiple use cases as it offers durability, availability, and cost-effectiveness. It allows users to store, manage, and securely access petabyte-scale data from the AWS cloud. By default, Amazon Billing shows how much data and cost is incurred for the cumulative [...]
Automating Amazon GuardDuty Notifications through Email Alerts
Amazon GuardDuty is a powerful security tool that helps to detect suspicious activities and threats in your AWS environment. It uses intelligent threat detection and provides you with a detailed view of potential security issues across your AWS account. Amazon GuardDuty continuously monitors your AWS resources and generates findings based on various threat intelligence sources. This allows you to identify security vulnerabilities and take necessary actions to secure your [...]
How to Setup Backup and Recovery in Azure
If you’re managing a cloud infrastructure, you understand that backups are created to safeguard critical data and ensure business continuity. In the event of a server failure, backups expedite the restoration of data and the prompt resumption of operations. It also allows you to revert to previous server states, which is helpful for version control and rollbacks. Additionally, backups are useful resources for testing, development, and creating replica environments. [...]
Streamlining EBS Snapshot Management with Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager Automation
Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) snapshots are an essential part of managing data on Amazon Web Services (AWS). EBS snapshots are backups of your EBS volumes, which are stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). They are crucial for data protection and disaster recovery, but managing EBS snapshots can be time-consuming and complex. Fortunately, Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) provides a solution to simplify EBS snapshot management. DLM is [...]
Enhancing S3 Bucket Security by Prohibiting Uploads of Unencrypted Objects
Amazon S3 is a widely used object storage service that allows users to store and retrieve large amounts of data. S3 is known for its scalability, durability, and cost-effectiveness, making it an ideal choice for many organizations. However, as with any cloud-based service, security is a crucial concern. One way to enhance the security of S3 buckets is by prohibiting the upload of unencrypted objects. In this article, we [...]
10 Years of AWS Certification: Is It Still Worth It to get AWS Certified this 2023?
10 years ago, on April 30 2013, Amazon Web Services launched its AWS Global Certification Program. The primary purpose of this program is to validate the necessary technical skills and knowledge required for building secure and reliable cloud-based applications using the AWS Cloud. Passing the AWS Certification exam means that you can prove your expertise and knowledge in AWS to your current employers or even to the prospective companies [...]
AWS Lambda: Synchronous vs Asynchronous Invocation
You can invoke a Lambda function in two ways. Synchronous Invocation The first one is called Synchronous invocation, which is the default mode. Synchronous invocation is pretty straightforward. When you invoke a function synchronously, AWS Lambda waits until the function is done processing, then returns the result. Let’s see how this works through the following example: The diagram illustrates a Lambda function-backed API that is managed by API Gateway. [...]
Connecting your Lambda Function to a Private Database
If you want your Lambda function to interact with resources (e.g., RDS database, EC2 instance) inside a private subnet, you won't be able to do so by default. The reason for this is that Lambda functions live in an isolated and secured VPC managed by AWS. This is why when you create a Lambda function, you don’t go through any networking configurations (VPC, subnet, ENIs), unlike when creating EC2 [...]
New AWS Cloud Practitioner Video Course Release and AWS Video Courses Price Drop
Beginners in cloud computing find it much simpler to learn various lectures or topics through video courses. It's undoubtedly among the best tools for learning that you can use in preparing for an AWS certification exam. Our Video Courses, created by AWS Certified professionals, will certainly help you prepare to pass your AWS certification exams. New AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner CLF-C02 Video Course The first step in AWS [...]
Configuring Azure Object Replication
Data replication is crucial for organizations focused on maintaining uninterrupted business operations, strengthening data safety, and enhancing application efficiency. Organizations can avert data loss, lessen downtime, and ensure continuous access to essential information by producing and overseeing multiple data duplicates across a range of systems and sites. In today's breakneck speed and interconnected world, data replication is vital for complying with regulatory standards and offering an outstanding user experience. [...]
How To Reduce Your Monthly Azure Usage
As organizations embrace the digital transformation era, they're turning to cloud computing to facilitate operations, scale up and down smoothly, and, most importantly, cut IT costs. Microsoft Azure is one of the powerhouses for providing cloud computing services to its users worldwide, providing numerous tools and services from computing power, storage, networking, databases, and AI. In this article, we will provide an insightful overview of the various strategies for [...]
Azure 101: Azure Migrate
In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, migrating to the cloud has become crucial for organizations seeking to remain competitive and agile. While the cloud offers numerous benefits, such as scalability, cost optimization, and flexibility, the migration process presents a unique challenge. These challenges include the need for technical expertise to navigate complex cloud environments, potential security risks that come with transferring sensitive data and ensuring a seamless transition with [...]
Azure 101: Protecting Your Resources Using Azure Resource Locks
Microsoft Azure provides a wide range of features and services to ensure the security and stability of cloud resources. One such feature is Azure Resource Locks, which helps organizations protect critical resources from accidental deletion or modification. In this article, we will explore the uses and benefits of Azure Resource Locks and the types of locks available, helping you understand how to leverage this feature for your organization's needs. [...]
How AWS IAM Handles Conflicting IAM Policies
Overview When a user attempts an action in AWS, such as launching an EC2 instance or listing S3 buckets, AWS evaluates all involved IAM policies to determine whether to grant the request. Since IAM policies can be associated with various types of identities, the hierarchy of these identities influences the final permissions for a user. AWS IAM Policy Evaluation Flow Let’s break down the process of how AWS evaluates [...]
Understanding the IAM:PassRole Permission
Introduction Many AWS services often require the use of an IAM role to execute actions on your behalf. For example, when you create a Lambda function, you assign an execution role to it. AWS can generate one for you automatically, and then you define the permissions you want it to have after. Most of the time, that's the case. However, there are instances when you might choose to associate [...]
Azure Arc Cheat Sheet
Azure Arc Cheat Sheet A hybrid cloud management platform for managing servers, Kubernetes clusters, and applications across on-premises, multi-cloud, and edge environments. Centralize resource management and deploy consistent Azure services anywhere. Azure Arc Features You can deploy Azure services (Azure Policy, Azure Monitor, and Azure Defender) anywhere, allowing them to use the same tools and processes across their entire hybrid cloud estate. Enforce policies, audit logs, and detect threats [...]
Different Ways of Passing Parameters Securely in CloudFormation
Introduction When writing CloudFormation templates, it's a security best practice to avoid hardcoding sensitive info, like client secrets, API keys, or passwords. Sharing templates with hardcoded details by mistake can put your infrastructure and data at risk. In this article, we'll explore different secure methods to pass parameters in CloudFormation templates. Using the NoEcho Attribute To avoid hardcoding parameters in your template, you can define them during stack creation [...]
Automate Confluence Backup Using AWS Step Functions
Introduction In this article, I'm gonna show you how you can create an automated Confluence backup in Atlassian using an AWS serverless solution. The motivation behind this article stems from a recent task I was working on a couple of weeks ago. My goal was to run a scheduled backup of Confluence data and export it to Amazon S3. Since Confluence backups are deleted 14 days after creation, it’s [...]
How To Peer Two Azure Virtual Networks
Organizations rely on efficient and secure communication between various infrastructure components in today's breakneck speed and interconnected world. Virtual Network Peering is a powerful solution to address these needs by seamlessly connecting resources across different Azure virtual networks. This feature enables organizations to optimize their network performance, reduce latency, and enhance security, all while minimizing costs. In this article, we will delve into the concept of virtual network peering, [...]
How to Get AWS Digital Badges for Free
Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a variety of digital badges that allow individuals to exhibit their proficiency and knowledge in different AWS technologies. These digital badges act as a virtual symbol of their accomplishments, providing an effective means of showcasing their expertise to potential employers, colleagues, and peers. In this article, we will explore what AWS digital badges are and provide guidance on how to get them for free [...]
Azure Virtual Machines vs Azure App Service – Which One Is Right For You?
Have you ever wondered during your cloud migration journey whether Azure Virtual Machines or Azure App service would best suit your workload requirements? In this article, we'll take a deep dive into the advantages and disadvantages of using Azure Virtual Machines and Azure App Service. By discussing the key differences, drawbacks of these services, and benefits, you can make an educated decision on where to host your application. You [...]
AWS Community Day Philippines 2023
AWS User Group Philippines is celebrating its 10-year anniversary by hosting the most awaited AWS Community Day Philippines 2023 event on the 29th and 30th of July. Join the learning and fun as the keynote speakers and industry leaders share their success stories, AWS use cases, swags, raffle prizes and many more AWSomeness! AWS Community Days are community-organized cloud education events that highlight technical discussions and demos by expert [...]
What’s New in AWS Certified Security Specialty SCS-C02 Exam in 2023?
After 5 years since its very first version was released, the AWS Certified Security Specialty exam will finally get its official update. The AWS Training and Certification team is releasing its new version, with an exam code of SCS-C02, on July 11, 2023. You can register for the new and updated SCS-C02 AWS Certified Security Specialty exam as early as June 13, 2023. Take note that the last day [...]
Introducing Amazon Bedrock – AWS response for OpenAI’s DALL·E 2, ChatGPT-4 and other Generative AI Rivals
There's no denying that all major tech companies now are on their toes, trying to grab enough Artificial Intelligence (AI) market share which has been exponentially growing for the past several years. The race has been further highlighted when OpenAI released its game-changing ChatGPT service which spread like wildfire for both geeks and non-IT professionals alike. Based on various reports, it is set to boom into a $90 billion [...]
Different Types of AWS Certifications Explained in a Nutshell
What is Amazon Web Services (AWS)? Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the most popular cloud service provider in the world, offering a wide range of cloud computing services to businesses and individuals. AWS certifications have become increasingly valuable as more and more companies move their workloads to the cloud. These certifications validate the skills and knowledge of individuals who work with AWS services, making them more employable and helping [...]
Increase Your Chances of Passing Your AWS, Azure, and GCP Exam with these Review Strategies
Have you ever considered obtaining a cloud certification but are unsure of the first steps or where to begin? Let me help you increase your chances of passing your AWS, Azure, and GCP exams with these review strategies. Embarking on a new journey can be daunting, especially when starting out. However, in this article, I will discuss how I started my path toward obtaining cloud certifications by sharing my [...]
How to Set Up Alerts Rules and Action Groups in Azure Monitor
In this article, we’ll learn how to create action groups and alert rules to automatically monitor our infrastructure and take automated actions based on certain conditions. The service that we’ll use for this tutorial is Azure Monitor. Alerts in Azure Monitor act as a watchdog, constantly monitoring your infrastructure and application for potential problems. It alerts you before users experience any problems by sending you alerts when something is [...]
How to Land a Job in Cloud Computing from Non-Tech Role
If you're interested in pursuing a career in cloud computing but lack a technical background, don't fret. Simply put, cloud computing involves the delivery of computing services over the internet, such as storage, processing power, and applications. In this article, we'll delve into some essential aspects of cloud computing that you should be aware of to improve your chances of landing a cloud-related job, even without prior technical experience. [...]
How Can I Learn AWS for FREE this 2023 (Beginner’s Guide)
For those interested in cloud computing or seeking to upgrade their skills, gaining knowledge of AWS can be a highly beneficial asset. Since AWS is currently the leading cloud service provider, there are numerous resources available, such as free online courses and documentation, which make starting with AWS both an uncomplicated and approachable process. If your goal is to become an AWS certified and you don’t have any experience [...]
Default Host Management Configuration on AWS Systems Manager
AWS Systems Manager’s Fleet Manager is a useful tool for managing Amazon EC2 instances on your account. It allows you to establish a private session to your instances, view detailed information about the instance, run automation such as patch installations, or execute specific Run commands to the instance’s operating system. It can also be used to manage on-premises servers or virtual machines. Using AWS Systems Manager tools requires that [...]
My DVA-C02 AWS Developer Associate Exam Experience
A few weeks ago, I took and passed the latest AWS Certified Developer Associate exam, DVA-C02. If you've already cleared DVA-C01 and intend to recertify, note that you can no longer book DVA-C01 exams. I suggest checking out this article I wrote a couple of months ago. This breaks down the changes you need to be aware of, and I’ve also shared my expectations for the DVA-C02 exam. In [...]
Customize Your Invite Links with Amazon S3 Website Redirect
If you use Discord, Slack, or Telegram, you're probably familiar with those long and complicated invite links used to join servers or channels. These links can be difficult to remember and may even discourage some people from joining. With URL redirection, you can create a custom and easy-to-remember domain name for your invite links. For example, you might use a domain like "discord.mycoolsite.com" that redirects to the invitation page [...]
Using Amazon Route 53 Resolver
In the previous blog post, we talked about Split-view DNS using Amazon Route 53, in which the DNS server gives out a different response to the same DNS query based on where the query came from. This is helpful if you are in a hybrid environment when you want an internal application to resolve a domain from a private hosted zone and external applications to resolve from a public [...]
Is a Cloud Computing Career Still Worth Pursuing in 2023?
Cloud computing has remained a hot topic in the IT field for the past years, gaining even more attention during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Between 2020 and 2021, there’s been a burst of cloud adoption from startups, mid-sized businesses, and even large enterprises as they looked for ways to adapt to remote work and digital operations. And it's no wonder, given the benefits it offers over traditional [...]
7 Most In-Demand IT Skills for 2023
Every day the growth of technology is exponential, there will come a time when the technology you've just learned will be obsolete. If you’re currently exploring opportunities in the IT industry, we’re gonna tackle the article provided by Indeed about the best IT jobs for the year 2023. Below, you'll find information that reflects the current trends and offers a chance to explore new career paths. Despite the anticipated [...]
Using Origin Access Control (OAC) to Secure S3 Object Access to CloudFront
What is Amazon S3 Object Access? Amazon S3 is one of the most popular AWS service organizations use, as it offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance for object storage. S3 is utilized to store and protect any amount of data for a range of use cases, such as data lakes, websites, mobile applications, backup and restore, archive, enterprise applications, IoT devices, and big data analytics. One of [...]
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner CLF-C01 Exam Domains
Amazon Web Services began its Global Certification Program in 2013 with the primary purpose of validating the technical skills and knowledge of IT Professionals in building secure and reliable cloud-based applications using the AWS Cloud. On April 2013, AWS launched its first-ever AWS Certification test called the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate exam. This was followed by the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator and AWS Certified Developer Associate exams. Amazon [...]
Retrieving Parameter Values from SSM Parameter Store through AWS Lambda
In today's world, serverless computing is gaining popularity as it offers technologies for running code, managing data, and integrating applications, all without managing servers. It eliminates the infrastructure management tasks so developers can focus on application development. One of the requirements of serverless development is storage for configuration data management and secrets management. Developers need to store data such as passwords, database strings, etc., at some point. Luckily, Parameter [...]
Secure EC2 Instances Connections Leveraging Session Manager
As more workloads are being migrated to the cloud, security should always be a top priority. Some organizations fail to consider security and therefore paid the price of having their workloads compromised. For example, an EC2 instance that has its SSH inbound port open to the world, therefore, providing unrestricted access to attackers globally. Luckily, AWS has a service that allows you to connect to your EC2 instances without [...]
Benefits of Being AWS Certified
Have you ever heard of AWS Certifications? Are you wondering if it is beneficial to get one? Is an AWS certification enough to land a cloud-related job? These are typical questions that aspirants ask and wonder if it’s favorable to commit to studying. For this article, we will discuss the benefits of being AWS certified and whether it’s worth it to invest time and effort. Let’s get started. Amazon [...]
AWS Amplify
AWS Amplify Cheat Sheet AWS Amplify is a platform that simplifies building and deploying full-stack applications with pre-built UI components, hosting options, and easy integration with AWS services. It's flexible and scalable, making it easy to add new features and adapt to changing requirements. Amplify Services AWS Amplify offers two main services: Amplify Hosting and Amplify Studio Amplify Hosting a fully managed CI/CD and hosting service for [...]
5 Best Cloud Projects For Beginners
If you are a student, career changer, or IT professional who wants to work in the cloud computing industry, you must present your portfolio to the interviewer. A portfolio is a collection of previous projects and experiences, which can be paid or unpaid. This shows the interviewer that you know what you're talking about and that you have the skills required for the job. As a beginner, you must [...]
Azure 101: Subscriptions And Management Groups
In Microsoft Azure, a subscription is an agreement between a customer and Microsoft on how to pay for and access Azure services. It is paid based on the consumption of services within the subscription. For example, if you provisioned Azure Virtual Machines, App Service, Azure SQL Database, and other services, your subscription will be billed based on using these services. There are many types of subscriptions. Each type of subscription may [...]
Azure 101: Regions And Availability Zones
Natural disasters are no laughing matter that we can take for granted; they can seriously mess up a business and its operations, especially when using traditional on-premises IT infrastructure. Luckily, with Azure regions and availability zones, companies can have a backup plan to ensure data redundancy, disaster recovery, scalability, and remote access. With Microsoft Azure, companies can continue to operate even in the face of natural disasters. This means [...]
Don’t Learn AWS Until You Know These Things
Learning AWS is like trying to drink from a firehose. At least, that's how I remember it felt when I jumped into AWS years ago as a non-IT guy. I often bounced around between different articles and Youtube videos, struggling to make sense of all the concepts. One moment, I'd be focusing on an EC2 tutorial but then realize I needed to understand VPCs first, so I'd click over [...]
What Is The AWS Community Builders Program And How To Apply
Are you passionate about creating technical content like blog posts, videos, etc., especially in Amazon Web Services (AWS)? Ever heard of AWS Community Builders Program? You might be interested in becoming an AWS Community Builder. In this article, we will discuss what AWS Community Builders Program is about, its benefits, and how to apply to become an AWS Community Builder. So what is AWS Community Builders Program? AWS Community [...]
Creating And Mounting An Azure File Share
A file server provides organizations with a system to centrally store, manage, and access files within a network, such as documents, images, videos, logs, etc. With file servers, users can easily share and collaborate on files with others. Azure Files is a fully managed file share solution that aims to replace or supplement on-premises file servers. It is a platform as a service (PaaS) offering by Microsoft Azure that [...]
Deploying Docker Images To Azure Container Apps
Containers, cloud-native, and microservices are all used in modern software development and deployment. A container is a standalone executable package that contains everything needed to run a piece of software, creating an isolated environment for the application. While microservices are an architectural paradigm for developing applications composed of small, independent services. This enables teams to autonomously build, deploy, and grow their services, increasing the speed and agility of the [...]
Reduce The Cost Of Your Lambda Functions With Event Filters (Part 2 of 2)
Introduction In the first part of this post, we covered the concept behind event filtering in AWS Lambda and learned how it could help you save money by invoking functions only when necessary. Now it's time to put that knowledge into practice. In this part 2, we’ll see event filtering in action using Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) as the event source. Overview A user sends a JSON message [...]
Reduce The Cost Of Your Lambda Functions With Event Filters (Part 1 of 2)
Problem statement You are primarily billed based on how long your Lambda functions run and how often it is invoked. This is why AWS Lambda is great for scheduled jobs, short-duration tasks, and event-based processes. But does this mean you shouldn’t use them for high-volume traffic applications? Well, the short answer is... it depends. Whether or not to use AWS Lambda for high-volume traffic workloads ultimately depends on the [...]
SFTP On Your Ubuntu EC2 Instance – Quick and Simple Setup
SFTP, which stands for Secure File Transfer Protocol, is a method of transferring files between computers. It operates over SSH (Secure Shell) and uses public-key cryptography for authentication. This means that your login credentials and file transfers are encrypted, making them much more secure than the traditional FTP (File Transfer Protocol). Why SFTP over SCP? SFTP and Secure Copy Protocol (SCP) are both network protocols that you can use [...]
Automate Resources In Azure Using ARM Templates
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a method of running IT infrastructure that automates, configures, and manages systems and networks using scripts or code. It can work with a variety of file formats, including JSON and YAML. YAML (YAML Ain't Markup Language) is a data serialization format that is commonly used in Ansible, Kubernetes, and other tools. While JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a popular data interchange format that is [...]
AWS Shared Responsibility Model
Cloud computing is changing the way businesses operate by providing scalable, pay-as-you-go infrastructure and services. The shared pool of configurable computing resources is made up of thousands of powerful physical servers located in data centers around the world and equipped with enterprise-grade processors capable of creating hundreds or even thousands of virtual machines for multiple customers. However, one of the primary concerns when migrating a private infrastructure to a [...]
Azure Storage Redundancy Options
What are the Azure Storage Redundancy Options? Azure storage redundancy options provide different levels of protection for data stored in Azure. These options ensure that data is available and retrievable in case of failure or data loss. There are several different types of consistency options available in Azure, each with its own features and benefits. Locally Redundant Storage (LRS) has the lowest level of consistency in Azure storage redundancies. [...]
Azure Resource Manager (ARM)
Azure Resource Manager Cheat Sheet Azure Resource Manager is a service that allows you to create, update, and delete resources in your Azure account. Enables you to manage access control, locks, and tags for your resources after they have been deployed. Features All requests are authenticated and authorized by ARM before being routed to the appropriate Azure service. Manage infrastructure using declarative templates and deploy it in a repeatable [...]
Cloud Computing Service Types: IaaS vs PaaS vs SaaS
What is IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS? IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS are three types of cloud computing services provided by Microsoft Azure. Each model has its advantages that help customers meet their specific needs. Each type of cloud computing service, and deployment method, provides you with different levels of control, flexibility, and management. With traditional on-premises data centers, customers have complete control over the hardware, server, virtualization, and software deployed. [...]
Estimating Your Azure Monthly Usage
Estimating your monthly Azure usage can be a daunting task and may deter interested customers of Azure from ever using it, especially if you are new to cloud computing. Fortunately, Microsoft Azure provides a tool that allows us to estimate the monthly consumption of our potential workloads in Azure. With the Microsoft Azure Calculator, it's easy to figure out how much to spend on Azure each month. This article [...]
Build Your Own Slack Commands with Lambda Function URL
What are Lambda Function URLs? In the past, calling a Lambda function over HTTP required a lot of setup and configuration with API Gateway. The process of setting up API resources and methods, and linking them to the appropriate Lambda function, can be overwhelming, especially for developers who are new to it. With the function URL feature of the AWS Lambda service, you can create a secure HTTPS endpoint [...]
Working With AWS CLI (AWS Command Line Interface)
What is AWS CLI? AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) is a tool used to manage and interact with AWS Services using the command line. Users more comfortable in the command line can leverage the AWS CLI as it offers the exact scope of functionality as the AWS Console. AWS CLI requires minimal configuration before you can use it. Installed it on your local machine running on Linux, Windows, and [...]
AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK)
AWS Cloud Development Kit Cheat Sheet The AWS CDK is an open-source software development framework for defining cloud infrastructure in code and provisioning it through AWS CloudFormation. It provides a high-level object-oriented abstraction on top of AWS CloudFormation that allows you to use pre-built cloud components called constructs. It uses familiar programming languages such as TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, C#, .Net, Java, and Go and deploys everything as CloudFormation stacks. [...]
Event-driven Transfer on Storage Transfer Service for Google Cloud Storage
Last January 7, 2023, Google Cloud announced a new capability for Storage Transfer Service (STS). Now, users can do an event-driven transfer quickly to a Cloud storage whenever there are changes to a source bucket. The event-driven transfer is an execution mode on Storage Transfer Service that allows transfer to a destination using the events from the source as triggers. Google Cloud claims that the transfer rate is near-real-time [...]
What’s New with the DOP-C02 AWS Certified DevOps Professional Exam in 2023?
Heads Up! The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Training and Certification team recently announced the third iteration of the AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional (DOP-C02) exam. Mark your calendar – March 7, 2023 is the first day that you will be able to take the latest version of the AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional - Professional exam which has an updated exam code of DOP-C02. Remember that the current [...]
Automatic SSH Key Pair Rotation via AWS Systems Manager Fleet Manager
Automatic SSH Key Pair Rotation via AWS Systems Manager Fleet Manager AWS Systems Manager has an extensive collection of features and capabilities to manage your AWS and hybrid systems. This service allows you to centralize operational data from various AWS services and automate manual tasks on both your on-premises and AWS resources. One of its capabilities is the AWS Systems Manager Fleet Manager, which provides a unified user interface [...]
Split-view DNS using Amazon Route 53
What is Amazon Route 53? Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable Domain Name System (DNS) service. This allows you to do Split-view DNS or Split-horizon DNS implementation for your applications. It offers additional features that are not present from third-party domain registrars. Route 53 allows you to register domain names, route internet traffic to specific resources under your domain name using different routing policies and check [...]
What’s New with the AWS Developer DVA-C02 Exam in 2023?
After almost 5 years since it was first released, the AWS Certified Developer Associate exam is finally getting revamped. The AWS Training and Certification team is launching a new version, with an exam code of DVA-C02, on February 28, 2023, making it the last of the three associate-level exams to receive a major overhaul. You can register for the new exam starting on January 31, 2023, or take the [...]
AWS Console Sign-In Options
In AWS, there are several ways to access and manage your organization's AWS resources, such as: AWS Management Console - a web-based user interface for creating and managing your AWS resources. AWS CLI - a command line interface that allows you to run scripts to control and automate multiple AWS services. AWS SDK - a software development kit containing a collection of libraries that developers can use to access [...]
OpenAI’s ChatGPT vs Amazon Lex
What is ChatGPT? OpenAI’s ChatGPT is an improved version of the GPT3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer, released in 2020) language model specifically designed to generate human-like text for chatbot applications. ChatGPT is trained on a large dataset of conversation transcripts and is able to generate appropriate responses to a wide range of inputs, including questions and prompts. ChatGPT uses a transformer architecture, which is a type of neural network designed [...]
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam Experience
The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam is a popular certification for individuals looking to demonstrate their knowledge of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform. This certification is suitable for individuals who are new to the AWS cloud and those who want to validate their understanding of the core AWS services and their use cases. The exam covers a wide range of topics, including the fundamentals of cloud computing, [...]
AWS re:Invent 2022 Announcements for AWS Machine Learning Engineers and Data Scientists
Every year, professionals all around the world attend the most transformative tech event — AWS re:Invent. Here, a LOT of new AWS services and capabilities are announced and discussed. In this post, we will focus on the major announcements relevant to data scientists and ML engineers! A Gentle Introduction to Amazon SageMaker The major announcements discussed in this post focus on SageMaker, so we will spend a paragraph or [...]
AWS re:Invent 2022 Highlights
If you’re new to AWS and haven’t heard of re:Invent, this is a global cloud community event where AWS announces new features and services. You also get to meet like-minded IT professionals who are eager to learn more about cloud computing. For November 28, 2022 - December 2, 2022, the biggest, most comprehensive, and the most vibrant event will be held again in Las Vegas. In this article, we’re [...]
What is Prometheus?
What is Prometheus? Prometheus is an open-source system monitoring and alerting toolkit originally built at SoundCloud. This tool's primary function is to collect and store metrics as time series data. For example, suppose you have a running web application that is too slow. You can use Prometheus to determine the response time of a web server or the number of active connections/queries in a database. Features: Multi-dimensional data model [...]
What is Grafana?
What is Grafana? Grafana is an open-source analytics and interactive visualization web app. When connected to supported data sources, it displays charts, graphs, and alerts on the web. The product is described as a "complete observability stack,” which includes everything you need to interact with your data. How It Works To visualize and analyze data in a dashboard, you’ll need to set up the following: Server - produces [...]
How to View your Actual AWS Bill if you have AWS Credits
Having AWS Credits can significantly reduce the cost of your cloud resources in your AWS account. However, there are some changes in your AWS Billing and Cost Management console that you must be aware of, to ensure that you still understand the running cost of your cloud services. You can easily view the actual bill of your Amazon Web Services (AWS) account on the Bills page by default, which [...]
My AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional SAP-C02 Exam Experience
I just passed the latest version of the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional SAP-C02! What a way to end the year strong! In this short article, I'll quickly discuss what this SAP-C02 exam is all about and the different things that can help you pass this mind-boggling test. The New AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional Exam The AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional SAP-C02) exam is one of the [...]
Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)
Bookmarks Concepts Security Monitoring Pricing Amazon MSK Cheat Sheet A service that uses fully managed Apache Kafka to ingest and process streaming data in real-time. Concepts Configuration If you do not specify a custom MSK configuration, a default configuration will be assigned to a cluster. You can use the custom configuration to new or existing MSK clusters. MSK configurations allow you to [...]
AWS CloudHSM
Bookmarks Use Case Concepts Monitoring Pricing AWS CloudHSM Cheat Sheet A computing device that enables you to provision and manage your own single-tenant HSMs for the generation and use of encryption keys. A hardware security module (HSM) performs cryptographic operations and provides secure storage for cryptographic keys. You can perform the following cryptographic tasks: Generate, store, import, export, and manage cryptographic keys. [...]
My SAA-C03 AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate Exam Experience
My team and I took the recently released AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate SAA-C03 exam version recently. The SAA-C03 test replaced the old SAA-C02 exam version last August. If you can compare the official exam guide of the previous SAA-C02 version with the latest one (SAA-C03), you may notice that the exam domains are almost exactly the same but with quite different domain percentages. For example, the "Design [...]
AWS Backup
Bookmarks Concepts Monitoring Pricing AWS Backup Cheat Sheet A service that enables you to centralize and automate data protection across AWS services and hybrid workloads. Concepts Backup plan A policy expression that determines when and how you want your AWS resources backed up. Stores periodic backups incrementally. A backup plan can be created using the AWS Backup console, API, CLI, SDK, or an [...]
AWS Compute Optimizer
Bookmarks Concepts Pricing AWS Compute Optimizer Cheat Sheet A service that recommends optimal AWS resources to reduce costs and improve performance of your workloads. Uses machine learning to analyze historical utilization metrics. You can view findings and recommendations across AWS Regions and accounts. Generates recommendations for the following resources: Amazon EC2 instances Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling groups Amazon EBS volumes AWS Lambda functions Concepts [...]
AWS AppSync
Bookmarks Concepts Monitoring Security Pricing AWS AppSync Cheat Sheet A serverless GraphQL and Pub/Sub API service that streamlines the development of modern web and mobile applications AppSync GraphQL APIs - provides a unified endpoint for securely querying and updating data from multiple databases, microservices, and APIs AppSync Pub/Sub APIs - data updates are automatically published to subscribed API clients via serverless WebSockets [...]
AWS Migration Hub
Bookmarks Features Concepts Monitoring Pricing What is AWS Migration Hub? AWS Migration Hub is a service for planning, orchestrating, and tracking application migration to AWS. Supports migration status updates from the following: AWS Application Migration Service AWS Database Migration Service AWS Migration Hub Features Use network visualization to quickly organize on-premises discovery data and accelerate migration planning. Strategy Recommendations analyzes your applications [...]
AWS Application Migration Service (AWS MGN)
Bookmarks How It Works Concepts Networking Monitoring Security Pricing An automated lift-and-shift solution that simplifies, expedites, and lowers the cost of migrating applications to AWS. It converts source servers to run natively on AWS. How It Works Install AWS Replication Agent on the source servers. If you use agentless replication for vCenter feature, you must add your source servers by [...]
AWS Certified Solutions Architect SAA-C03 Content Update
With the new version of AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate exam coming out very soon, we are delighted to let you know that we started transitioning our SAA practice exams from the SAA-C02 to the new SAA-C03 exam version based on the brand new cloud services that AWS recently released. We also released the new SAA-C03 version of our AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate Study Guide eBook [...]
AWS Application Discovery Service
Bookmarks Concepts Monitoring Pricing AWS Application Discovery Service Cheat Sheet A service that collects usage, behavior, and configuration data from on-premises servers to help you plan your migration to AWS. The collected data can be exported to Amazon Athena and Amazon QuickSight for analysis. Integrated with AWS Migration Hub to track the migration status of each application from the home Region. Concepts Discovery [...]
AWS License Manager
Bookmarks Concepts Monitoring Security Pricing AWS License Manager Cheat Sheet A service for centrally managing software licenses across AWS and on-premises environments. It gives you control and visibility into license usage, allowing you to limit licensing overages and reduce the risk of noncompliance and misreporting. Supports a variety of licensing models: Perpetual - lifetime license with no expiration date. Floating - shareable [...]
AWS Serverless Application Repository
Bookmarks Publishing Applications Deploying Applications Monitoring Pricing AWS Serverless Application Repository Cheat Sheet The AWS Serverless Application Repository is a managed repository for deploying and publishing serverless applications. You can also use pre-built applications instead of cloning, building, packaging, and publishing source code to AWS before deploying it. Each application includes an AWS SAM template that specifies the AWS resources that will [...]
AWS Lake Formation
Bookmarks How It Works Concepts Security Pricing AWS Lake Formation Cheat Sheet A service for managing and building data lakes. It stores and catalogs data from databases and object storage before transferring it to a new S3 data lake. You can also use ML algorithms to clean and classify data and secure access to sensitive data with granular [...]
AWS Control Tower
Bookmarks Concepts Networking Monitoring Pricing AWS Control Tower Cheat Sheet A service for configuring and managing a multi-account AWS environment. AWS Control Tower Concepts Landing zone A multi-account environment that is well-architected and adheres to security and compliance best practices. Each organization can have one landing zone. A container that holds the following: Organizational Units (OUs) Accounts Users Other Resources Structure [...]
Amazon AppFlow
Bookmarks Features Concepts Pricing Amazon AppFlow Cheat Sheet An integration service that automates data flows by securely integrating third-party applications and AWS services without writing any code. Features Run flows on-demand or on a schedule to keep data in sync across SaaS applications and AWS services. Aggregate data from multiple sources to train analytics tools more effectively and save money. Use flow management [...]
AWS Audit Manager
Bookmarks Features Concepts Monitoring Security Pricing AWS Audit Manager Cheat Sheet A service that will help you audit your AWS usage on a regular basis in order to simplify risk management and compliance with regulations and industry standards. Automates evidence collection for policies, procedures, and activities, as well as the creation of audit reports. Features Centrally manage and upload evidence from [...]
AWS Outposts
Bookmarks Concepts Monitoring Pricing AWS Outposts Cheat Sheet A managed service that brings AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools to the customer's premises. Concepts Outpost site is a physical location where AWS will install your Outpost. Outpost configurations include EC2, EBS, and networking capabilities. Each configuration has its own requirements for power, cooling, and weight support. The compute and storage resources are called [...]
AWS Proton
Bookmarks Concepts Monitoring Pricing AWS Proton Cheat Sheet A managed delivery service for deploying container and serverless applications. Uses templates to define and maintain standard application stacks, which include the architecture, infrastructure resources, and the CI/CD pipeline. Concepts Templates Manage and provision resources using Infrastructure as Code (IaC). Environment Template - a shared infrastructure used by multiple applications or resources. Standard Environment Template [...]
Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus
Bookmarks Features Concepts Pricing Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus Cheat Sheet A managed monitoring service for container environments. You can monitor and alert on the performance of containerized workloads using the open-source PromQL without having to scale or manage the underlying infrastructure. Automatically scale the ingestion, storage, alerting, and querying of operational metrics as workload increases. Integrated with Amazon EKS, Amazon ECS, and [...]
Amazon Managed Grafana
Bookmarks Components Security Pricing What is Amazon Managed Grafana? A data visualization service for querying, correlating, and visualizing operational metrics, logs, and traces from multiple sources. Create dashboards and visualizations to analyze metrics, logs, and traces without having to build, package, or deploy Grafana servers. All logical Grafana server deployment, setup, scaling, and maintenance are handled by AWS. Integrated with the following AWS [...]
AWS Network Firewall
Bookmarks Features Concepts Monitoring Pricing AWS Network Firewall Cheat Sheet A managed service that helps deploy network protections for Amazon VPCs. Provides fine-grained network traffic control that allows you to restrict outbound requests to prevent malicious activity from spreading. Import previously created rules in common open source rule formats and enable integrations with managed intelligence feeds from AWS partners. With AWS Firewall [...]
AWS Wavelength
Bookmarks Features Concepts Pricing AWS Wavelength Cheat Sheet A service that allows developers to create applications with ultra-low latencies for mobile devices and end users. Wavelength Zones can be used to extend an Amazon VPC in order to run ultra-low latency applications that use the same AWS services, APIs, tools, and functionalities. Features Wavelength Zones support a wide range of compute instances for [...]
AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional Exam Guide Study Path SAP-C02
Bookmarks Study Materials AWS Services to Focus On Common Exam Scenarios Validate Your Knowledge Final Notes The AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional Exam SAP-C02 Overview Few years ago, before you can take the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional exam (or SA Pro for short), you would first have to pass the associate level exam of this track. This is to ensure [...]
What’s New with the SAP-C02 AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional exam this 2023?
The AWS Training and Certification team recently announced the third iteration of its challenging AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional (SAP-C02) exam. The first day to take the new version of the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional exam would be on November 15, 2022, with an updated exam code of SAP-C02. Take note that the current version (SAP-C01) will only be available on November 14, 2022 so you still [...]
Whitelisting Access to Application Load Balancer Through The Use of AWS WAF
Load balancing an application is a common approach to distributing traffic among multiple servers. It has a breadth of benefits that can optimize performance, including availability and responsiveness, as it spreads the workload from one server to another, preventing server overload. AWS has a wide variety of load balancer types. But one of the most commonly used for web servers is the Application Load Balancer (ALB), as it functions [...]
Exploring AWS Cloud Quest: Cloud Practitioner Game
What is AWS Cloud Quest? AWS Cloud Quest is an open-world, role-playing game that teaches you how to create AWS solutions using cloud concepts and exercises based on real life. It helps you learn the intricacies of modern cloud technologies and have fun at the same time. Cloud Quest features 12 real-life scenario assignments which prepare and train you to become an AWS Cloud Practitioner at absolutely no cost. [...]
AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Exam – SAA-C03 Study Path
Bookmarks Exam Overview Difference between SAA-C02 and SAA-C03 SAA-C03 Study Materials Additional SAA-C03 Whitepapers Core SAA-C03 AWS Services to Focus On Other SAA-C03 AWS Services That You Should Prepare For Common Exam Scenarios for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate SAA-C03 AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate SAA-C03 Video Course Validate Your Knowledge Some Notes Regarding Your SAA-C03 Exam [...]
AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty ANS-C01 Exam Study Path
Bookmarks AWS Certified Advanced Networking Specialty Overview ANS-C01 Study Materials for ANS-C01 Core AWS Services to Focus On AWS Services That Will Appear In The ANS-C01 Exam Irrelevant AWS Services That Will NOT Appear In The ANS-C01 Exam Important ANS-C01 Networking Topics Common Exam Scenarios for ANS-C01 Validate Your Knowledge The AWS Certified Advanced Networking - Specialty ANS-C01 [...]
Building Dynamic Start and Stop Scheduler Functions for Non-Distributed Applications Under Auto-Scaling Group
In AWS, it’s of utmost importance to consider the cost in every aspect. In fact, cost optimization is one of the 6 pillars of a well-architected framework, therefore, it must be included in every step in building solutions in AWS. There are infinite ways to reduce bills but one of the most popular ones for EC2 instances is to start or stop them, especially if they don't need to [...]
Real-time Monitoring of 5XX Errors using AWS Lambda, CloudWatch Logs and Slack
Monitoring is the best friend of every system administrator. It gives visibility into what is happening on your application so that when an issue occurs, you or someone in your team could be alerted and do the necessary measures to mitigate it. However, this can only be as effective as the metrics you're keeping track of. There are plenty of factors that can affect application performance. And while it’s [...]
Automatically stop non-production RDS databases with AWS Lambda and Amazon EventBridge
Every AWS service offering comes with a pay-as-go pricing model, empowering businesses, small or large, to be flexible at experimenting and making changes as they build their products to market. This pricing model is similar to riding an Uber, where you only pay for the distance covered, or to electric bills where you’re charged based on actual energy consumption. Of course, the more devices you have running, the higher [...]
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)
Bookmarks Components Storage Networking Security Monitoring Pricing Amazon EKS Cheat Sheet A managed service that allows you to run Kubernetes on AWS without installing, operating, or maintaining your own Kubernetes control plane or nodes. Integration with various AWS services to provide scalability and security for your applications: Amazon ECR for container images Elastic Load Balancing for load distribution IAM for [...]
The New AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate SAA-C03 This August 2022
Heads up! AWS just announced today that there would be a new version of their popular AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate exam. The new SAA exam code will be upgraded to SAA-C03 this coming August. Mark your calendars as the last day to take the current SAA-C02 exam version would be on August 29, 2022. Thus, if you need to recertify, you have to make sure that you book the current exam [...]
What’s New with the SAA-C03 AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate exam this 2022?
The AWS Training and Certification team recently announced that there’s yet another version release of its popular AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate exam will be released this August 30, 2022. Its new exam version would be SAA-C03. Take note that the current version (SAA-C02) will only be available on August 29, 2022 so you still have time to recertify. The new SAA-C03 will be focused on Security, as shown on its official [...]
AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty MLS-C01 Exam Study Path
Bookmarks Study Materials AWS Services to Focus on Common Exam Scenarios Validate Your Knowledge Final Remarks The AWS Machine Learning — Specialty MLS-C01 Certification is intended for individuals who are responsible for developing data science or applied machine learning projects on the AWS Cloud. This specialty certification is quite different from any other AWS exam. If you already have prior experience [...]
Getting Started with SageMaker Ground Truth Private Workforce
Before we begin, let’s quickly talk about what Amazon SageMaker is and what it is used for. If this is your first time learning about Amazon SageMaker, it is the machine learning platform of AWS that helps solve the different requirements of data scientists, developers, and machine learning practitioners. It has several features and capabilities that assist in the different stages of the machine learning process. In this tutorial, [...]
AWS Transfer Family
Bookmarks Benefits How to delegate access Managing users Pricing AWS Transfer Family Cheat Sheet AWS Transfer Family is a secure transfer service for moving files into and out of AWS storage services, such as Amazon S3 and Amazon EFS. With Transfer Family, you do not need to run or maintain any server infrastructure of your own. You can provision a Transfer Family [...]
Scalable Data Processing and Transformation using SageMaker Processing (Part 2 of 2)
In this 2-part tutorial, we will focus on SageMaker Processing and how we can use it to solve our data processing needs. Our overall goal is to demonstrate how to use SageMaker Processing to help us perform Min-Max scaling on a dataset in its own dedicated and easily scalable environment. If you are looking for Part 1, you can find it here. As mentioned in Part I, we have [...]
Scalable Data Processing and Transformation using SageMaker Processing (Part 1 of 2)
Amazon SageMaker is the machine learning platform of AWS which helps solve the different requirements of data scientists and machine learning practitioners. It has several features and capabilities that assist in the different stages of the machine learning process. Here is a simplified list of the capabilities of SageMaker mapped to some of the stages of the ML lifecycle. SageMaker Processing Data Preparation and Processing SageMaker Training Model Training [...]
AWS Certified Sysops Administrator Associate (SOA-C02) Exam Experience
I recently took the new AWS Certified SysOps Administrator SOA-C02 exam last week via the Pearson Vue online proctoring. There are a lot of recently introduced features and services that showed up in this new version which you should be aware of. The new version included the new Exam Labs section in the test, which is unique among the other existing AWS certifications. If you’re planning to take this exam soon, [...]
Sample SysOps Exam Lab Scenario #1 – Create an Alarm Using a Metric Filter
This sample exam lab was taken from our AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate Practice Exams. Check out our practice test course for more exam lab scenarios. LEARNING OBJECTIVE The goal of this lab exercise is to help you understand how you can leverage CloudWatch Logs, CloudWatch Metrics, CloudWatch Alarms, and Amazon SNS services in creating an automated alarm system that can inform you of unusual activity in your AWS [...]
ELB Health Checks vs Route 53 Health Checks For Target Health Monitoring
We all know that health checks are a very useful tool for making sure that AWS services such as AWS ELB and Amazon Route 53 know the state of their targets before forwarding traffic to them. In this section, we will take a look at ELB health checks and Route 53 health checks, and compare them with one another. Health Check Service AWS Elastic Load Balancing Amazon Route53 What [...]
Interface Endpoint vs Gateway Endpoint vs Gateway Load Balancer Endpoint
Interface Endpoint Gateway Endpoint Gateway Load Balancer Endpoint An elastic network interface with a private IP address that serves as an entry point for traffic destined to a supported AWS service, endpoint service, or AWS Marketplace service. For each interface endpoint, you can choose only one subnet per Availability Zone. Endpoints are regional, which means they are only usable within the same region they are created in. Since interface [...]
Amazon EFS vs Amazon FSx for Windows vs Amazon FSx for Lustre
Amazon EFS Amazon FSx for Windows File Server Amazon FSx for Lustre • Amazon EFS is a serverless, scalable, high-performance, POSIX-compliant file system in the cloud. • EFS file systems can be accessed by Amazon EC2 Linux instances, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, AWS Fargate, and AWS Lambda functions via a file system interface such as NFS protocol. • Amazon EFS supports file system access semantics such as strong consistency [...]
How to Create Wait Conditions in a CloudFormation Template
Wait Conditions, as the name suggests, is a tool used to control the order of creation of the AWS resources in a CloudFormation stack. It can pause the creation of a stack and wait for a signal to ensure that specific resources and configurations were properly launched before resuming the stack creation process. Use cases: For example, you want to make sure that a specific domain name is working [...]
Multi-Account Multi-Region Data Aggregation On AWS Config
AWS Config is a service that tracks changes made to resources associated with an AWS account. This service can give you a detailed view of the resource configuration’s timeline so you can go back in time and identify when and what resource the change was made into. It also enables you to determine the overall compliance against the rules and configurations specified in your guidelines. This simplifies compliance auditing, [...]
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams vs Data Firehose vs Data Analytics vs Video Streams
Data Streams Data Firehose Data Analytics Video Streams Short definition Scalable and durable real-time data streaming service. Capture, transform, and deliver streaming data into data lakes, data stores, and analytics services. Transform and analyze streaming data in real time with Apache Flink. Stream video from connected devices to AWS for analytics, machine learning, playback, and other processing. Data sources Any data source (servers, mobile devices, IoT devices, etc) [...]
Specifying Triggers for AWS Config Rules
AWS Config allows you to set “rules” to evaluate configuration settings on your AWS resources. The result of these rule evaluations are then displayed on the AWS Config web console. You can control the frequency of rule evaluations by AWS Config by specifying a trigger. A trigger refers to the method of evaluation for your config rules. There are two types of triggers to select from when creating a [...]
Setting up AWS Systems Manager for Hybrid Environments
AWS Systems Manager allows your organization to monitor and control their infrastructure on AWS and on-premises environments. Systems Manager provides a unified interface to which you can monitor thousands of servers and services of AWS. Essentially, Systems Manager simplifies resource and application management, shortens the time to detect and resolve operational problems, and makes it easy to operate and manage your infrastructure securely at scale. The following are the [...]
Asymmetric vs. Symmetric Encryption KMS Keys
Even before the Internet, the security, privacy, and integrity of information have always been the top concern of institutions like banks, hospitals, and universities. Nobody wants their personal information (name, address, credit card number, etc.) to be exposed in public for anyone to use. Imagine signing up on your favorite social media website, and after a few days, somewhere on the globe has been using your profile and pretending [...]
Amazon Textract
Amazon Textract Cheat Sheet A fully managed document analysis service for detecting and extracting information from scanned documents. Returns extracted data as key-value pairs (e.g., Name: John Doe) Supports virtually any type of documents Can detect text written in Standard English alphabet and ASCII symbols. Common Use Cases: Building search indexes Importing documents into a business application Building automated document processing solutions Text extraction for Natural Language Processing (NLP) [...]
Amazon Augmented AI (A2I)
Amazon Augmented AI Cheat Sheet Amazon A2I is a service that helps you easily integrate human reviews in a machine learning workflow. Simplifies managing a large number of human reviewers at scale. Has direct integration with Amazon Textract and Amazon Rekognition Common Use Cases: Content Moderation where human oversight is required to judge uncertain results from a machine learning model. Manual reviews of low confidence predictions due to documents [...]
Amazon Personalize
Amazon Personalize Cheat Sheet A fully managed machine learning service for building recommendation systems. Amazon Personalize allows you to train, build, and deploy recommendation models without an extensive machine learning experience. Offers batch and real-time recommendations. Common Use Cases: Personalized product and content recommendations. Product rankings. Improves marketing communication through individualized push notifications and emails. Concepts Amazon Personalize can provide recommendations based on real-time data, historical data, or a [...]
My AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate SOA-C02 BETA Exam Experience in 2021
I took the BETA version of the new AWS Certified SysOps Administrator SOA-C02 exam last week via the Pearson Vue online proctoring. There are a lot of recently-introduced features and services that showed up in this new version which you should be aware of. There is also a new Exam Labs section in the test, which is unique among the other existing AWS certifications. If you’re planning to take [...]
Microsoft Entra ID vs Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
Microsoft Entra ID Azure RBAC Description An identity and access management service that helps you access internal and external resources. An authorization system that manages user’s access to Azure resources including what they can do with those resources and what areas they can access. Focus Grants permissions to manage access to Microsoft Entra resources. Grants permissions to manage access to Azure resources. Scope Tenant level Specify at multiple [...]
AWS Managed Policies For Job Functions
AWS managed policies for job functions are policies that contain sets of permissions required for a specific job function or role (especially in the IT industry). It is designed to simplify the creation of policies by combining the permissions for many services into a single policy. You can attach these policies for job functions to any group, user, or role. To further understand this, let’s consider the scenario below: [...]
Amazon Aurora vs Amazon RDS
Aurora RDS Type of database Relational database Features • MySQL and PostgreSQL compatible. • 5x faster than standard MySQL databases and 3x faster than standard PostgreSQL databases. • Use Parallel Query to run transactional and analytical workloads in the same Aurora database, while maintaining high performance. • You can distribute and load balance your unique workloads across different sets of Aurora DB instances using custom endpoints. • [...]
My AWS Certified Security Specialty Exam Experience – Tips and Important Notes
My AWS Certified Security Specialty Exam Experience - Tips and Important Notes The AWS Certified Security - Specialty is included in the top 10 Most Popular Cybersecurity Certifications based on Global Knowledge’s 2020 IT Skills and Salary Report. Beating some of the famous security certifications on the list (e.g. CEH, CompTia: Security+) only shows how influential AWS has been to the IT industry in the previous years. Not only [...]
AZ-104 Microsoft Azure Administrator Exam Study Guide
Bookmarks Study Materials Azure Services to Focus On Validate Your Knowledge Final Remarks The AZ-104 Microsoft Azure Administrator certification exam is designed for people who have experience in implementing, managing, and monitoring a Microsoft Azure environment. The exam will test your technical skills in implementing solutions based on different scenarios. Having prior experience in infrastructure management will help you understand the concepts [...]
GCP Associate Cloud Engineer Exam Study Guide
Bookmarks Study Materials GCP Services to Focus on Validate Your Knowledge Google offers the Associate Cloud Engineer (ACE) as an Associate level certification for individuals who already have IT experience but are relatively new to the Google Cloud Platform. For individuals with zero IT experience or for non-IT people who want to learn Google Cloud, you might want to check Google’s Cloud Digital [...]
Amazon Aurora Machine Learning
Amazon Aurora Machine Learning is a proprietary technology of Amazon that enables a native SQL user to integrate Machine Learning-based predictions to an application without knowing or understanding any machine learning algorithms. Machine learning heavily relies on datasets for it to work. You can say that data is the oil that keeps the engine of machine learning running. There is a massive amount of data generated every day. To [...]
Amazon Comprehend
Bookmarks Common Use Cases Concepts Amazon Comprehend Medical Pricing Validate Your Knowledge What is Amazon Comprehend? A managed Natural Language Processing (NLP) service that you can use to extract meaningful information from unstructured texts so you can analyze them in a human-like context. It is an off-the-shelf solution that does not require deep machine learning expertise to get started. Works with [...]
AWS DeepLens
AWS DeepLens Cheat Sheet A deep learning-enabled camera for developers A wireless-enabled camera integrated with AWS Cloud Capable of delivering 100GFLOPS of computing power (1 billion operations per second) Contains sample projects at launch to get you started Optimized for Apache MXNet, TensorFlow, and Caffe Integrates with Amazon Rekognition for advanced image analysis Common use cases Developing computer vision applications such as: Face Detection Activity Detection Object Detection Bird [...]
Amazon SageMaker AI
Bookmarks Concepts Common Training Data Formats For Built-in Algorithms Input modes for transferring training data Two methods of deploying a model for inference SageMaker features Optimization Amazon SageMaker Monitoring Amazon SageMaker Pricing Validate Your Knowledge Amazon SageMaker AI Cheat Sheet A fully managed service that allows data scientists and developers to easily build, train, and deploy machine [...]
Amazon Lex
Amazon Lex Cheat Sheet A service that can help you build conversational interfaces using voice and text. Uses automatic speech recognition (ASR) to convert speech to text. Uses natural language understanding (NLU) for recognizing the intent of the text. Provides highly-engaging user experiences and lifelike conversational interactions. Gets more intelligent over time by using deep learning. Common Use Cases AI Chatbots Informational bots Enterprise Productivity bots Voice Assistants Concepts [...]
Amazon Elastic Inference
Amazon Elastic Inference Cheat Sheet Allows attaching low-cost GPU-powered inference acceleration to EC2 instances, SageMaker instances, or ECS tasks. Reduce machine learning inference costs by up to 75%. Common Use Cases Computer vision Natural language processing Speech recognition Concepts Accelerator A GPU-powered hardware device provisioned. It is not a part of the hardware where your instance is hosted. Uses AWS PrivateLink endpoint service to attach to the instance over [...]
Amazon Polly
Bookmarks Common use cases Concepts Features Pricing Validate Your Knowledge Amazon Polly Cheat Sheet A text-to-speech (TTS) service Uses advanced deep learning technologies to convert text into natural, lifelike speech It supports saving text into MP3, OGG, and PCM file formats. Offers Standard and Neural TTS (NTTS) Common Use Cases Increase customer engagement Language learning applications Helps visually impaired individuals to [...]
Amazon Transcribe
Amazon Transcribe Cheat Sheet A fully managed automatic speech recognition (ASR) service. Converts speech into text. It supports a wide variety of audio coding formats such as WAV, MP3, MP4, FLAC, AMR, AMR-WB, Ogg, and WebM. It can process batch and streaming transcriptions. Common Use Cases Transcribing customer calls Meeting transcription Closed captioning Generating metadata to create a searchable archive Concepts A confidence score is between 0 and 100, [...]
Amazon Translate
Amazon Translate Cheat Sheet A Neural Machine Translation service that provides fluent translation with higher accuracy than traditional statistical and rule-based translation models. Powered by deep learning models that deliver fast, accurate, and affordable translation between supported languages. Supports batch translation, real-time, and on-demand translations. Common Use Cases Language localization Translating content for text analytics Cross-lingual communication Concepts Amazon Translate uses a Translation Model that consists of two (2) [...]
NEW EXAM VERSION – AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate SOA-C02 vs SOA-CO1
AWS previously announced a new update on the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate exam. This certification exam is designed for individuals who have at least a year of hands-on experience with networking, management, deployment, and security on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform. The sample exam questions can be found in this link. The beta version of the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate (SOA-C02) exam was made available from February 16 [...]
Logging Using awslogs Log Driver in Amazon ECS
Monitoring and logging can be as important as developing and deploying applications. Imagine managing an enterprise-level distributed application that runs on hundreds of containers. You must place your containers cleverly on instances to achieve a certain level of resilience and performance. On top of that, you would want to have visibility into CPU and memory usage so you’ll have an idea which task/tasks are resource-hungry at a given time. [...]
AWS Savings Plan
AWS Savings Plan Cheat Sheet Savings Plan is a flexible pricing model that helps you save up cost on Amazon EC2, AWS Fargate, and AWS Lambda usage. You can purchase Savings Plans from any account, payer or linked. By default, the benefit provided by Savings Plans is applicable to usage across all accounts within an AWS Organization/consolidated billing family. You can also choose to restrict the benefit of Savings [...]
NEWS: AWS re:Invent 2020 will be Hosted Online and Registration is FREE!
NEWS: AWS re:Invent 2020 will be Hosted Online and Registration is FREE! AWS re:Invent is a conference organized by Amazon Web Services for the cloud computing community. Since 2012, the conference has always been held in Las Vegas, but this time it’s going to be different. This 3-week conference will now be hosted online, and take note that this event is FREE for everyone. To join AWS re:Invent 2020 [...]
AWS Glue
Bookmarks Use Cases Concepts Populating the AWS Glue Data Catalog Authoring Jobs Glue DataBrew Monitoring Security Pricing Validate Your Knowledge AWS Glue Cheat Sheet A fully managed service to extract, transform, and load (ETL) your data for analytics. Discover and search across different AWS data sets without moving your data. AWS Glue consists of: Central metadata repository [...]
Managing Amazon GuardDuty Security Findings Across Multiple Accounts
In our previous article, we discussed how GuardDuty can help organizations monitor their workloads and AWS accounts from malicious activities and how to monitor findings with Amazon CloudWatch Events. Imagine that your organization has multiple AWS accounts for different workloads, teams, and projects. With every account, you need to monitor GuardDuty findings individually. It will be quite difficult for your security team to monitor these findings with their constant [...]
Monitoring GuardDuty Findings with Amazon CloudWatch Events
Large scale cyber attacks are now becoming normal in this age of interconnectivity. As we rely more and more on cloud technologies, companies are looking to tap into digital innovations to improve their businesses. Cyber attacks are costing companies millions of dollars of downtime not to mention the possibility of lawsuits whenever an attack occurs. It is imperative that security teams have the means to prevent, detect, and take [...]
Aurora Serverless Tutorial Part 2
In the first part of this tutorial, we gave a walkthrough on Aurora Serverless and its use case. You can read the article here. For this tutorial, we will do some hands-on training and create an Aurora Serverless database. Creating an Aurora Serverless Database: 1. Open the AWS console and go to RDS. Click the button “Create database”. 2. Choose Amazon Aurora. You can either choose MySQL or PostgreSQL [...]
Aurora Serverless Tutorial – Part 1
What is Aurora Serverless? Before we get into it, let us briefly define Aurora and serverless first. Aurora is a fully managed, closed source relational database that is compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL. According to Amazon, it is five times faster than the standard MySQL and three times faster than PostgreSQL. It uses a distributed architecture that provides fault tolerance and high availability. Serverless is a technique in the [...]
Google BigQuery vs BigTable
BigQuery BigTable BigQuery is Google Cloud's fully managed, petabyte-scale, and cost-effective analytics data warehouse that lets you run analytics over vast amounts of data in near real-time. You can use bq command-line tool or Google Cloud Console to interact with BigTable. You can access BigQuery by using the Cloud Console, by using the bq command-line tool, or by making calls to the BigQuery REST API using a variety of [...]
Google Cloud Functions vs App Engine vs Cloud Run vs GKE
Serverless compute platforms like Cloud Functions, App Engine, and Cloud Run lets you build, develop, and deploy applications while simplifying the developer experience by eliminating all infrastructure management. On the other hand, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) runs Certified Kubernetes that helps you facilitate the orchestration of containers via declarative configuration and automation. Both Google serverless platforms and GKE allows you to scale your application based on your infrastructure requirement. [...]
Google Cloud Storage vs Persistent Disks vs Local SSD vs Cloud Filestore
Google Cloud Storage Persistent Disks Local SSD Cloud Filestore Cloud Storage is a service for storing your objects in Google Cloud. An object is an immutable piece of data consisting of a file of any format. You store objects in containers called buckets. You specify a location for storing your object data when you create a bucket. You can either select region, dual-region, and multi-region as location. Objects stored [...]
Google Compute Engine vs App Engine
Google Compute Engine Google App Engine Compute Engine delivers configurable virtual machines running in Google's data centers with access to high-performance networking infrastructure and block storage solutions. App Engine is a fully managed, serverless platform for developing and hosting web applications at scale. Delivered as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Delivered as Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) Supported Languages: Any Supported Languages: Go, Python, Java, Node.js, PHP, Ruby (.Net and Custom runtimes for Flexible Environment) [...]
Google Cloud Build
Google Cloud Build Cheat Sheet Build, test, and deploy on Google Cloud Platform’s serverless CI/CD platform. Features Cloud build is a fully serverless platform that helps you build your custom development workflows for building, testing, and deploying. Cloud Build can import source code from: Cloud Storage Cloud Source Repositories GitHub Bitbucket Supports Native Docker. You can import your existing Docker file. Push images directly to Docker image storage repositories [...]
Google Container Registry
Google Container Registry Cheat Sheet Container Registry is a container image repository to manage Docker images, perform vulnerability analysis, and define fine-grained access control. Features Automatically build and push images to a private registry when you commit code to Cloud Source Repositories, GitHub, or Bitbucket. You can push and pull Docker images to your private Container Registry utilizing the standard Docker command-line interface. The system creates a Cloud Storage [...]
Google Cloud Source Repositories
Google Cloud Source Repositories Cheat Sheet A fully managed git repository where you can securely manage your code. Features You will be able to extend your git workflow with Cloud Source Repositories. Set up a repository as a Git remote. Push, pull, clone, log, and perform other Git operations as required by your workflow. You can create multiple repositories for a single Google Cloud project. This allows you to [...]
Google Cloud Deployment Manager
Google Cloud Deployment Manager Cheat Sheet Google Cloud Deployment Manager is an infrastructure deployment service that automates the creation and management of Google Cloud resources. Features You can write template and configuration files and utilize them to create deployments that have a variety of Google Cloud services working together, such as: Cloud Storage Compute Engine Cloud SQL A configuration defines the structure of your deployment. You must specify a [...]
Google Cloud Monitoring
Bookmarks Features Workspaces Cloud Monitoring Agent Pricing Validate Your Knowledge Google Cloud Monitoring Cheat Sheet Cloud Monitoring collects metrics, events, and metadata, hosted uptime probes, and application instrumentation to gain visibility into the performance, availability, and health of your applications and infrastructure. Features Collect metrics from multicloud and hybrid infrastructure in real time. Metrics, events, and metadata are displayed with rich [...]
Google Cloud Logging
Bookmarks Features Cloud Audit Logs Exporting Audit Logs Pricing Validate Your Knowledge Google Cloud Logging Cheat Sheet An exabyte-scale, fully managed service for real-time log management. Helps you to securely store, search, analyze, and alert on all of your log data and events. Features Write any custom log, from any source, into Cloud Logging using the public write APIs. You can [...]
Google Cloud Billing
Bookmarks Features Cloud Billing Account & Payments Profile Cloud Billing Reports Cloud Billing Budgets Overview of Cloud Billing roles in IAM Validate Your Knowledge Google Cloud Billing Cheat Sheet You can configure billing on Google Cloud in a variety of ways to meet different needs. To use Google Cloud services, you must have a valid Cloud Billing account, Features If [...]
Google Cloud Console
Google Cloud Console Cheat Sheet Google Cloud Console is a web admin interface to manage your Google cloud infrastructure. Features You can create projects on Google Cloud Console. With Cloud Console, you can quickly find and check the health of all your cloud resources in one place, including virtual machines, network settings, and data storage. Logging Manage and audit user access to project resources. Track down production issues quickly [...]
Google Cloud Secret Manager
Google Cloud Secret Manager Cheat Sheet Secret Manager is a secure and convenient method to store API keys, passwords, certificates, and other sensitive data. It provides a central place as the source of truth to manage, access, and audit secrets across Google Cloud. Features Secret names are project-global resources, but secret data is stored in regions. You can choose specific regions in which to store your secrets. Secret data [...]
Google Cloud Key Management Service
Google Cloud KMS Cheat Sheet The Google Cloud Key Management Service (KMS) is a cloud-hosted key management service that enables you to manage encryption keys on the Google Cloud Platform. Features Lets you manage your symmetric and asymmetric cryptographic keys the same way you manage them in an on-premises environment. You can decide to use the keys generated by Cloud KMS with other Google Cloud services. These keys are [...]
Google Cloud Armor
Google Cloud Armor Cheat Sheet Help protect your applications and websites against denial of service and web attacks. Detect and mitigate attacks against your Cloud Load Balancing workloads. Mitigate OWASP Top 10 risks and help protect workloads on-premises or in the cloud. Features Comes with predefined rules for protection against OWASP Top 10 risks. Easily monitor the metrics associated with your policies in the Cloud Monitoring dashboard. View suspicious [...]
Google Cloud Identity
Google Cloud Identity Cheat Sheet Cloud Identity is an API for provisioning and managing identity resources. Is a unified identity, access, app, and endpoint management (IAM/EMM) platform that helps IT and security teams maximize end-user efficiency, protect company data, and transition to a digital workspace. Features Use a single admin console to manage user, access, app, and device policies. Monitor your security and compliance posture with reporting and auditing [...]
Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Bookmarks Features Roles Service Accounts Policy Groups Best Practices Validate Your Knowledge Google Cloud IAM Cheat Sheet Create and manage permissions for your Google Cloud resources with Identity Access Management (IAM). Provides a unified view into your organization’s security policy with built-in auditing to ease compliance purposes. Features Lets you authorize who can take specific actions on resources to [...]
Google Cloud Router
Google Cloud Router Cheat Sheet Cloud Router is a fully distributed and managed Google Cloud service that helps you define custom dynamic routes and scales with your network traffic. Features It works with both legacy networks and Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) networks. Cloud Router utilizes Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to exchange routes between your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) network and your on-premises network. Using Cloud Router is required or [...]
Google Cloud Hybrid Connectivity
Bookmarks Cloud Interconnect Direct Peering Carrier Peering Cloud VPN Validate Your Knowledge Google Cloud Hybrid Connectivity Cheat Sheet There are several ways to extend your on-premises environment to the Google Cloud Platform. You can connect your infrastructure to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) on your terms, from anywhere based on your requirements. Cloud Interconnect Provides low latency, highly available connections that enable [...]
Google Virtual Private Cloud
Bookmarks Key Concepts Network and Subnets Configuring IP Addresses Firewall Rules Routes Communications and access for APP Engine Connecting VPC Networks Pricing Validate Your Knowledge Google Virtual Private Cloud Cheat Sheet You can create and manage your own virtual topology network where you can launch your Google Cloud resources using Google Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). Google VPC [...]
Google Cloud CDN
Google Cloud CDN Cheat Sheet The Google Cloud CDN (content delivery network) service accelerates your web content delivery by using Google’s global edge network to bring content as close to the user as possible. It helps you reduce latency, cost, and load for your backend services. Features Activates with a single click for Cloud Load Balancing users. Cloud CDN supports modern protocols originally developed at Google, like HTTP/2 and [...]
Google Cloud Load Balancing
Google Cloud Load Balancing Cheat Sheet Google Cloud Load Balancing allows you to put your resources behind a single IP address. Features Can be set to be available externally or internally with your Virtual Private Network (VPC). HTTP(S) load balancing can balance HTTP and HTTPS traffic across multiple backend instances, across multiple regions. Enable Cloud CDN for HTTP(S) load balancing to optimize application delivery for your users with a [...]
Google Cloud DNS
Google Cloud DNS Cheat Sheet Cloud DNS is Google’s infrastructure for production quality and high-volume authoritative DNS serving. Features Authoritative DNS Lookup Cloud DNS translates requests for domain names like www.google.com into IP addresses like 74.125.29.101. Manage your DNS records for your domain using Google Cloud Console. Create managed zones for your project so you can add, edit, and delete DNS records. You can control permissions at a project level and [...]
Google Cloud Dataproc
Google Cloud Dataproc Cheat Sheet Build fully managed Apache Spark, Apache Hadoop, Presto, and other OSS clusters on the Google Cloud Platform using Cloud Dataproc. Features You can spin up resizable clusters quickly with various virtual machine types, disk sizes, number of nodes, and networking options on Cloud Dataproc. Dataproc provides autoscaling features to help you automatically manage the addition and removal of cluster workers. Cloud Dataproc has built-in [...]
Google Cloud Dataflow
Google Cloud Dataflow Cheat Sheet Cloud Dataflow is a fully managed data processing service for executing a wide variety of data processing patterns. Features Dataflow templates allow you to easily share your pipelines with team members and across your organization. You can also take advantage of Google-provided templates to implement useful but simple data processing tasks. Autoscaling lets the Dataflow automatically choose the appropriate number of worker instances required [...]
Google Cloud Dataprep
Google Cloud Dataprep Cheat Sheet Cloud Dataprep by Trifacta is an intelligent data service for visually exploring, cleaning, and preparing structured and unstructured data for analysis, reporting, and machine learning. Features You can transform structured or unstructured datasets of any size — megabytes to petabytes — with equal ease and simplicity. Cloud Dataproc can transform datasets stored in CSV, JSON, or relational table formats. You can process data stored [...]
Google BigQuery
Bookmarks Features Loading data into BigQuery Querying from external data sources Monitoring Pricing Validate Your Knowledge Google BigQuery Cheat Sheet A fully managed data warehouse where you can feed petabyte-scale data sets and run SQL-like queries. Features Cloud BigQuery is a serverless data warehousing technology. It provides integration with the Apache big data ecosystem allowing Hadoop/Spark and Beam workloads to [...]
Google Cloud Pub/Sub
Bookmarks Features Key Concepts Publisher-subscriber relationships Pricing Validate Your Knowledge Google Cloud Pub/Sub Cheat Sheet Cloud Pub/Sub is a fully-managed real-time messaging service for event driven systems that allows you to send and receive messages between independent applications. Features Capable of global message routing to simplify multi-region systems. Synchronous, cross-zone message replication and per-message receipt tracking ensure at-least-once delivery at any [...]
Google Cloud Bigtable
Google Cloud Bigtable Cheat Sheet A fully managed NoSQL database service designed for large analytical and operational workloads and enables you to store terabytes or even petabytes of data. Features You can use Cloud BigTable to store and query time-series data. It is ideal for storing large amounts of single-keyed data. Scales seamlessly from thousands to millions of reads/writes per second. Resize your cluster nodes to adjust Cloud Bigtable [...]
Google Cloud Filestore
Google Cloud Filestore Cheat Sheet Fully managed NFS file servers on Google Cloud for Compute Engine and Google Kubernetes Engine instances Most commonly used for media rendering, data analytics, and managing shared content. Features Simple, fast, consistent, scalable, and easy to use network-attached storage. You can copy data from Cloud Storage to a filestore fileshare that is mounted on a Compute Engine instance. Data is encrypted at rest and [...]
Google Cloud Functions
Google Cloud Functions Cheat Sheet A pay-as-you-go function as a service (FaaS) to run your code with zero server management. Features There is no need to provision, manage, or upgrade servers. Cloud Functions can be written using: Node.js Python 3 Go Java Automatically scales based on load without thinking about the infrastructure. Built-in security at role and per function level based on the least privilege principle. Allows you to [...]
Google Cloud Spanner
Google Cloud Spanner Cheat Sheet A fully managed relational database service that scales horizontally with strong consistency. Features SLA availability up to 99.999% for multi-regional instances with 10x less downtime than four nines. Provides transparent, synchronous replication across region and multi-region configurations. Optimizes performance by automatically sharding the data based on request load and size of data so you can spend less time thinking about scaling your database and [...]
Google Cloud SQL
Google Cloud SQL Cheat Sheet A fully managed relational database service. Cloud SQL is available for: MySQL PostgreSQL SQL Server Features Scale instantly with a single API call as your data grows. Automated and on-demand backups are available. You can restore your database instance to its state at an earlier point in time by enabling binary logging. Data replication between multiple zones with automatic failover. You can perform an [...]
Google Cloud Storage (GCS)
Bookmarks Buckets Bucket Configurations Storage Classes gsutil tool Uploading objects to GCS Pricing Validate Your Knowledge Google Cloud Storage Cheat Sheet An object storage service that stores data within buckets. Below is a sample Cloud Storage integration: Buckets The data you upload on Cloud Storage are called objects. An object is an immutable piece of data consisting of a [...]
Google Cloud Run
Bookmarks Features Cloud Run for Anthos What images you can deploy Pricing Google Cloud Run Cheat Sheet Is a managed compute platform that enables you to run stateless HTTP containers that are invokable via web requests or Pub/Sub events. Features Cloud Run is serverless which means it abstracts away all the infrastructure management and maintenance so you can focus more on building [...]
Local SSD
Local SSD Cheat Sheet Is a local solid-state drive storage physically attached to the server that hosts your virtual machine (VM) instances. Features Tightly coupled to a physical server that offers superior performance, very high input/output operations per second (IOPS), and very low latency compared to other block storage options. Each local SSD is 375 GB. Moreover, you can attach a maximum of 24 Local SSD partitions. You can [...]
Persistent Disks
Bookmarks Features Zonal and Regional Persistent Disks Persistent Disk Types Encryption Snapshots Pricing Persistent Disks Cheat Sheet Are durable network storage devices that you can provision to host your virtual machine instances. Features Data on each persistent disk is distributed across several physical disks and is designed for high durability. It stores data redundantly to ensure data integrity. Persistent disks [...]
Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
Bookmarks Features Kubernetes Cluster Architecture Kubernetes API Objects GKE Sandbox Pricing Validate Your Knowledge Google Kubernetes Engine Cheat Sheet Secured and managed Kubernetes services with auto-scaling and multi-cluster support Features Can be configured to automatically scale node pool and clusters across multiple node pools based on changing workload requirements. Auto-repair can be enabled to do health checks on node Choose [...]
Google App Engine
Bookmarks Features Types of Scaling Pricing Validate Your Knowledge Google App Engine Cheat Sheet A highly scalable fully managed serverless platform for developing and hosting web applications. Features A fully managed environment to allow you to concentrate on deploying your application. Custom runtimes allow you to bring any library and framework to App Engine by supplying a Docker container. Application versioning is [...]
Google Compute Engine (GCE)
Bookmarks Configurations Instance Templates Instance Groups Managing access to your instances Backing up your instance Sole Tenant Nodes Preemptible Instances Shielded Instances Instance Life Cycle GCP Marketplace Live Migration Pricing Validate Your Knowledge Google Compute Engine Cheat Sheet Linux-based and Windows-based virtual machines Each instance you create belongs to a project A project [...]
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Pricing
GCP Pricing Cheat Sheet GCP’s customer-friendly pricing allows businesses to pay as you go, without termination fees, and no upfront costs. Google Cloud Free Program New customers are given $300 free Cloud Billing credits valid for 90 days to explore and evaluate the Google Cloud Platform. Free Tier Limits are also available for all GCP customers on selected Google Cloud services – like GCE, GCS, and BigQuery. The free [...]
Google Cloud Global Infrastructure
Google Cloud Global Infrastructure Cheat Sheet The cloud infrastructure of GCP is built around: 20+ regions 70+ zones 140+ network edge locations Multi-regions A large geographic area, such as the United States, that contains two or more geographic places. Regions Are collections of zones that provide high-bandwidth, low-latency network connections to other zones in the same region. Regional resources can be used by any resource in that region, regardless [...]
Google Cloud Platform Overview
Google Cloud Platform Cheat Sheet The Google Cloud Platform is the infrastructure that powers the Google products you are familiar with including Gmail, Search, and Google Photos. In April of 2008, Google announced its first service called App Engine, a cloud compute service for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centers. Since then, Google has evolved and added more cloud services to its platform. GCP lets developers [...]
Lifecycle Event Hooks in CodeDeploy
Bookmarks Events Things To Consider In biology, life cycle refers to the series of stages or events that occur during an organism’s lifetime. Lifecycle also applies when automating software deployment on AWS CodeDeploy. Lifecycle event hooks refer to the series of events that describes how a deployment is accomplished. It allows you to control or perform actions on different stages of your deployment. In [...]
Amazon EBS Multi-Attach
Amazon Elastic Block Store or EBS is a durable block-based storage device that can be attached to your EC2 instance. AWS released a feature called Multi-Attach, which allows EC2 instances to share a single EBS volume for up to 16 instances and provide higher availability of your applications for Linux workloads. Each instance to which the volume is attached has full read and write permissions to the volume. The [...]
ECS Network Modes Comparison
Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) allows you to run Docker-based containers on the cloud. Amazon ECS has two launch types for operation: EC2 and Fargate. The EC2 launch type provides EC2 instances as hosts for your Docker containers. For the Fargate launch type, AWS manages the underlying hosts so you can focus on managing your containers instead. The details and configuration on how you want to run your containers [...]
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner vs Microsoft Azure AZ-900 Exam
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner vs Microsoft Azure AZ-900 Exam One way to boost your career in the cloud computing space is through certifications. These exams will help validate your current understanding and knowledge in the cloud. Cloud service providers offer different learning paths such as Cloud Architect, Cloud Developer, and Cloud Administrator. Both AWS and Microsoft have introductory certifications that will test your understanding of the basics. AWS has [...]
Amazon SES
Bookmarks Common Use Cases Features Methods of Sending Emails Testing Amazon SES Concepts Email Authentication Methods Email Sending Requests Dedicated IP Addresses vs Amazon SES IP Addresses Security Pricing Limits Amazon SES Cheat Sheet A cost-effective and scalable email service that enables you to send mail from within any application. A regional service. Amazon SES [...]
Azure CycleCloud
Azure CycleCloud Cheat Sheet Orchestrate and manage high-performance computing (HPC) environments on Azure. Enables you to provision infrastructure for HPC systems, deploy familiar HPC schedulers, and scale the infrastructure automatically to run jobs efficiently at any scale. Features Scheduler Agnostic - use standard HPC schedulers or extend CycleCloud autoscaling plugins to work with your own scheduler. Manage Compute Resources - manage VMs and scale sets to provide a set [...]
Azure Batch
Azure Batch Cheat Sheet A service that runs large-scale parallel and high-performance computing (HPC) batch jobs in Azure. Allows you to run jobs in a group of Linux or Windows virtual machines. Components A task represents a unit of computation and a job is a collection of tasks. Job priority values range from the lowest priority to the highest priority. To specify certain limits for your jobs, you can [...]
Azure Service Bus
Azure Service Bus Cheat Sheet A fully managed message broker service. It allows you to decouple applications and services. Provides a reliable and secure platform for asynchronous data and state transfer. Enables you to deliver messages to multiple subscribers and fan-out message delivery to downstream systems. Features Message Sessions for implementing first in, first out (FIFO) and request-response patterns to ensure the order of messages in the queue. Autoforwarding [...]
Azure Service Fabric
Azure Service Fabric Cheat Sheet A distributed systems platform that helps package, deploy, and manage scalable and reliable microservices and containers. Build microservices and container-based applications using the programming language of your choice, including .NET Core 2.0, C #, and Java. It supports two types of microservices: Stateless - It does not maintain a mutable state outside a request and its response from the service such as protocol gateways [...]
Azure ExpressRoute
Bookmarks Features Use Cases Pricing Validate Your Knowledge Azure ExpressRoute Cheat Sheet Enables you to establish a private connection between your on-premises data center or corporate network to your Azure cloud infrastructure. More secure, reliable, and faster than conventional VPN connections. Supports dynamic routing between your network and Microsoft via Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). The connection is redundant in every peering location [...]
Azure Front Door
Azure Front Door Cheat Sheet A service that uses Microsoft's global network to improve the availability and performance of your applications to your local and global users. It works at the HTTP/HTTPS layer and uses a split TCP-based anycast protocol to ensure your users connect to the nearest Front Door point of presence. Supports a range of traffic-routing methods and backend health monitoring options for various application needs and [...]
Azure Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
Bookmarks Concepts Roles Best Practices Validate Your Knowledge Azure Role-Based Access Control Cheat Sheet A role-based access control service to manage user’s access to Azure resources including what they can do with those resources and what areas they can access. It is an authorization system based on Azure Resource Manager, which provides fine-grained access management of Azure resources. Concepts A role assignment [...]
Microsoft Compliance Offerings
Microsoft Compliance Offerings Cheat Sheet Microsoft Trust Center provides access to security, privacy, and compliance information. Security - provides information about identity & access management, threat & information protection, and cloud security. Privacy - provides information on how you can secure your data at rest and in transit. Compliance - provides information about industry-specific requirements, audit reports, and shared responsibility. Microsoft Privacy Statement explains how Microsoft collects personal data, [...]
AWS vs Azure Services Comparison
Bookmarks Compute Other Compute Services Comparison Storage Other Storage Services Comparison Database Other Database Services Comparison Networking Other Networking Services Comparison Security and Identity Other Security and Identity Services Comparison AWS vs Azure Services Comparison Cheat Sheet To help you learn the different Microsoft Azure services, we’ve come up with this AWS vs Azure services comparison. [...]
Google Cloud Certifications Path
Bookmarks Associate Cloud Engineer Professional Cloud Architect Professional Cloud Developer Professional Data Engineer Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer Professional Cloud Security Engineer Professional Cloud Network Engineer Professional Collaboration Engineer Professional Machine Learning Engineer In the previous article, we talked about the most in-demand Azure Certifications in the market today. In this article, we'll discuss the certifications offered by [...]
Azure Certifications Path
Bookmarks Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) Azure Administrator Associate (AZ-104) Azure Developer Associate (AZ-204) Azure Solutions Architect Expert (AZ-104 and AZ-305) Azure DevOps Engineer Expert (AZ-104/AZ-204 and AZ-400) In the previous article, we have discussed the different AWS Certifications path. In this article, we will give you an overview of the top and most in-demand Azure certifications today. Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) Purpose The [...]
AWS Certification Path
Before jumping into the different AWS certification paths, it's good to first learn the benefits of being AWS certified through this short article. It is also important to note that AWS has scrapped the prerequisite for Professional-level exams. Previously, you could only take the Professional-level exams (Solutions Architect Professional and DevOps Engineer Professional) after passing their Associate-level counterparts. Now, you can take any AWS exam without the need to [...]
AZ-900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals Exam Study Path
Bookmarks Study Materials Azure Services to Focus On Validate Your Knowledge The AZ-900 Microsoft Azure Fundamentals certification exam is intended for individuals who want to have a foundational knowledge when venturing into the Cloud. Although the AZ-900 test is the easiest to achieve among all the Azure certification exams, you still need to learn and properly understand the concepts on cloud computing, and [...]
Unique Ways to Build Credentials and Make a Successful Career Shift to Cloud Computing
In the previous post, we discussed whether having cloud certifications is enough to land a job. You can view the article here. In this section, we'll share some noteworthy activities that you can do to build your credentials and help you land a cloud-related job. Trying to land a job in the field of cloud computing with no prior work experience can drive people mad. Most entry-level positions on [...]
Azure Virtual Network (VNet)
Bookmarks Key Concepts VNet Use Case Subnets Security VNet Components VNet Peering Pricing How to Connect Virtual Networks Across Azure regions with Azure Global VNet Peering Validate Your Knowledge Azure Virtual Network Cheat Sheet You can create a virtual network in the cloud dedicated to your Azure account. It is the fundamental building block where you can [...]
Azure Container Instances (ACI)
Azure Container Instances Cheat Sheet Run containers without managing servers. For event-driven applications, quickly deploy from your container development pipelines, run data processing, and build jobs. Azure Container Instances is a regional service. Features Containers have less overhead than VMs and can be deployed consistently. All the dependencies for an application are included in the container image. Applications running in containers can be deployed easily to multiple operating systems [...]
Azure Database for MySQL and PostgreSQL
Azure Database for MySQL and PostgreSQL Cheat Sheet PaaS relational database services Mitigate database downtime with high availability, redundancy, and resiliency capabilities. Enables you to scale vertically when needed. Receive alerts based on the metrics of your servers. Protect sensitive data at rest and in transit. Automated backups, up to 35 days. PostgreSQL deployment options: Single Server and Hyperscale (Citus) Single server pricing tiers: Basic, General Purpose, and Memory [...]
Azure Virtual Machine vs Web App
Azure Virtual Machine Azure Web App Description Infrastructure as a service, if you need to have full control over your computing environment. Platform as a service, it allows you to integrate the app without managing the underlying infrastructure. Deploy Uses an OS image. Uses a runtime stack. State Management Stateful or stateless Stateless Autoscaling You need to use VM scale sets to support autoscaling in virtual machines. Autoscaling [...]
Interview Tips to Help You Land a Cloud-Related Job
This is the last part of our Introduction to Cloud Computing blog series. In this article, we'll give some interview tips to help you land a job and build a fruitful career in cloud computing. The average time for a job interview lasts around 30-45 minutes. And within this limited time-frame, you must leave an impressive mark and good impression to your prospective employer. We will clear off the [...]
Are Cloud Certifications Enough to Land me a Job?
The sad truth is that getting a job with just a certification alone is difficult or almost impossible to achieve. Cloud Certifications are a great way to display your credibility and validate your knowledge. It also shows that you have invested time and money into improving your skill set. But if you want to pursue a career in cloud computing, having certifications alone isn't gonna cut it; you need [...]
AWS vs Azure vs GCP – Which One Should I Learn?
In the previous section, we outlined the different certifications paths for AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. In this post, we'll compare these top three cloud service providers and share the advantages of learning these technologies. Selecting a cloud platform to learn depends on several factors, like your current skills, demands in the job market, and even personal preferences. Remember, there's no hard and fast rule dictating which one to [...]
AWS, Azure, and GCP Certifications Path
In cloud computing and the IT industry in general, one way to prove that you know what you’re talking about is through certifications. If you are new to cloud, you might be wondering which AWS, Azure or Google Cloud certification exam is suitable for you. The first thing you need to do before you start is to write down your purpose in getting certifications. Is it for career growth, [...]
Introduction to Google Cloud Platform
In the previous posts, we gave you an introduction to AWS and Microsoft Azure. In this tutorial, we will walk you through the basics of the Google Cloud Platform. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a global cloud services suite offered by Google that uses the same infrastructure that they use internally for their end-user products. In April of 2008, Google announced its first cloud computing service called the App [...]
Introduction to Microsoft Azure
In the previous section, we gave you an overview of AWS. In this section, we'll give you an introduction to Microsoft Azure. Azure is a cloud computing platform that was introduced by Microsoft in 2010. It gives you the ability to create, manage, and deploy applications across a vast global network. Microsoft Azure also offers a range of services to help your company address the existing and potential business [...]
Introduction to AWS
In 2006, Amazon launched its own IT Infrastructure Services called Amazon Web Services. AWS is a cloud platform where you can create, build, and deploy applications. The different AWS services can be accessed over the Internet and it provides premium support plans to help companies run their business applications and workloads on the cloud. Amazon Web Services also has the biggest market share in the cloud industry and has [...]
Why Should I Learn Cloud Computing?
In the previous article, we talked about the fundamentals of cloud computing. In this section, we will give you three reasons why you should learn cloud computing. We have a long history of how technological advancements have influenced the way society thinks and strives. Needless to say, technology has created and destroyed livelihoods. One good example is the rise and fall of switchboard operators. A switchboard operator is a [...]
Fundamentals of Cloud Computing
In the previous post, we discussed what cloud computing is all about. In this section, we'll talk about the fundamentals of cloud computing. Before you deep dive into the different cloud services, let's first take a look at the summary of the fundamentals of cloud computing. Cloud services are usually classified by their general use cases that make up an IT infrastructure. You can think of them as lego [...]
What is Cloud Computing?
The first time you hear the term Cloud Computing, you probably have asked yourself these questions: “What exactly is the Cloud in Cloud Computing?” and “Why do so many companies use it?” Basically, cloud computing is an on-demand computing service that you can avail over the Internet to host and run your applications. The “cloud” in cloud computing simply refers to the underlying network or servers that run your [...]
I Have No IT Background. Is it Possible for Me to Make a Career Shift to Cloud Computing?
One of the most common questions that we often get from our subscribers is this: “I have no IT background - is it possible for me to make a career shift to Cloud Computing?” It can be quite hard to enter the job market, especially the cut-throat IT industry, if you don’t have any technical background. However, with the right strategy and steps, you can successfully jump to a [...]
Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB)
Bookmarks How it Works Common Use Cases Components Of QLDB Performance Scalability Reliability Backup and Restore Security Pricing Limitations Amazon Quantum Ledger Database Cheat Sheet Fully managed ledger database that provides a transparent, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable transaction log owned by a central trusted authority. Used to track all application data changes, and maintain a complete [...]
Azure Load Balancer vs Application Gateway vs Traffic Manager vs Front Door
Load Balancer Application Gateway Traffic Manager Front Door Service Network load balancer. Web traffic load balancer. DNS-based traffic load balancer. Global application delivery Network Protocols Layer 4 (TCP or UDP) Layer 7 (HTTP/HTTPS) Layer 7 (DNS) Layer 7 (HTTP/HTTPS) Type Internal and Public Standard and WAF - Standard and Premium Routing Hash-based, Source IP affinity Path-based Performance, Weighted, Priority, Geographic, MultiValue, Subnet Latency, Priority, Weighted, Session Affinity Global/Regional [...]
Azure Blob vs Disk vs File Storage
Blob Storage Disk Storage File Storage Type of storage Object storage to store all types of data formats. Block storage for virtual machines. File system across multiple machines. Max Storage Size Same as maximum storage account capacity 65,536 GiB for ultra disk 32,767 GiB for standard and premium drives Scale up to 100 TiB Max File Size 190.7 TiB for block blob 195 GiB for append blob 8 [...]
Azure Scale Set vs Availability Set
Availability Set Scale Set Description A group of discrete virtual machines spread across fault domains. A group of identically configured virtual machines spread across fault domains. Workloads Use Availability Set for predictable workloads. Use Scale Set for unpredictable workloads (autoscale). Domain default Has 3 fault domains and 5 update domains by default Has 5 fault domains and 5 update domains by default Configuration Virtual machines are created from [...]
Azure Functions vs Logic Apps vs Event Grid
Functions Logic Apps Event Grid Service Serverless Compute Serverless Workflows Serverless Events Description Run a small piece of code to do a task Automate your workflows without writing a single line of code. Route custom events to different endpoints. Features Serverless applications Choice of language Bring your own dependencies Integrated security Flexible development tools Stateful serverless architecture Built-in and managed connectors Control your workflows Manage or manipulate data [...]
Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs Microsoft Sentinel
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Microsoft Sentinel Description Unified infrastructure security management system Intelligent security analytics and threat intelligence service. Category Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) / Cloud Workload Protection Platform (CWPP) Security Information Event Management (SIEM) / Security Orchestration Automated Response (SOAR) Function Provides security alerts, scores, vulnerability assessment, recommendations, and security posture management. Provides alert detection, threat visibility, proactive hunting, and threat response. Features Microsoft Defender ATP [...]
Azure Policy vs Azure Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
Azure Policy Role-based Access Control (RBAC) Description Ensure resources are compliant with a set of rules. Authorization system to provide fine-grained access controls. Focus Policy is focused on the properties of resources. RBAC focuses on what resources the users can access. Implementation You specify a set of rules to prevent over-provisioning of resources. You grant permission on what users can create. Default access By default, rules are set [...]
Azure SQL Database vs Cosmos DB
Azure SQL Database Azure Cosmos DB Type of Database Relational database NoSQL database Features Has several SQL deployment options for different kinds of workloads - SQL databases, SQL managed instances, SQL virtual machines. Delivers single-digit millisecond response times and instant scalability. Storage Size 100 TB for SQL database 8 TB for SQL managed instance 256 TB for SQL virtual machine Unlimited storage per database and container. Availability SQL [...]
Network Security Group (NSG) vs Application Security Group
Network Security Group Application Security Group Description A network security group is used to enforce and control network traffic. An application security group is an object reference within an NSG. Features Controls the inbound and outbound traffic at the subnet level. Controls the inbound and outbound traffic at the network interface level. Rules Rules are applied to all resources in the associated subnet. Rules are applied to all [...]
Locally Redundant Storage (LRS) vs Zone-Redundant Storage (ZRS)
Locally-Redundant Storage (LRS) Zone Redundant Storage (ZRS) Geo-redundant storage (GRS) Replication Replicates your data 3 times within a single physical location synchronously in the primary region. Replicates your data across 3 Azure Availability Zones synchronously in the primary region Replicates your data in your storage account to a secondary region Redundancy Low Moderate High Cost Provides the least expensive replication option Costs more than LRS but provides higher [...]
Azure Container Instances (ACI) vs Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
ACI AKS Description Run containers without managing servers. Orchestrate and manage multiple container images and applications. Deployment For event-driven applications, quickly deploy from your container development pipelines, run data processing, and build jobs. Uses clusters and pods to scale and deploy applications. Web Apps (Monolithic) Yes Yes N-Tier Apps (Services) Yes Yes Cloud-Native (Microservices) Yes Yes, recommended for Linux containers Batch/Jobs (Background tasks) Yes Yes Use cases Dev/Test [...]
10 Common Use Cases of Cloud Computing
In the previous post, we gave you a few compelling reasons why you should learn cloud computing. In this section, we'll share with you the 10 most common use cases of cloud computing. Cloud computing is a powerful way of quickly building I.T infrastructures that can scale at any time. Large businesses and corporations have started moving their operations into the cloud as early as a decade ago. And [...]
Amazon DocumentDB
Bookmarks How it Works Performance Scaling Reliability Backup and Restore Security Pricing Limitations Amazon DocumentDB Cheat Sheet Fully managed document database service designed to be fast, scalable, and highly available. Data is stored in JSON-like documents. Compatible with MongoDb. Flexible schema and indexing. Commonly used for content management, user profiles, and real-time big data. How it Works [...]
Azure Policy
Azure Policy Cheat Sheet Ensure resources are compliant with a set of rules. Manage your policies in a centralized location where you can track their compliance status and verify the non-compliant resources. Select between built-in policies and custom policies. Implement proper guardrails and assess compliance across the organization Policy vs. RBAC A policy maintains compliance with the resource state, while RBAC focuses on controlling user actions at different scopes. [...]
Azure DNS
Bookmarks Private DNS Security Pricing Validate Your Knowledge Azure DNS Cheat Sheet Enables you to host your DNS zone and manage your DNS records. DNS zone allows you to configure a private and public DNS zone. Alias recordsets: A - maps the host to IPv4. AAAA - maps the host to IPv6. CNAME - create a record to point to another domain. [...]
Azure Cosmos DB
Bookmarks Features Consistency Levels Security Pricing Azure SQL Database vs Cosmos DB Validate Your Knowledge Azure Cosmos DB Cheat Sheet Globally distributed database that supports NoSQL. A fully-managed database service with turnkey global distribution and transparent multi-master replication. Features Cosmos DB offers encryption at rest. It replicates every partition across all the regions. CosmosDB offers single-digit millisecond reads and writes in all regions. [...]
Azure Pricing
Azure Pricing Cheat Sheet Azure offers pay-as-you-go and reserved instances for pricing. Azure Pricing Factors: Resource size and resource type. Different Azure locations have different prices for services. The bandwidth of your services. Any data transfer between two different billing zones is charged. Ingress (data in) = free Egress (data out) = charged based on data going out of Azure datacenters Factors that can reduce costs: By purchasing a [...]
Azure DevOps
Azure DevOps Cheat Sheet A service that offers a set of tools for planning, building, and deploying applications. Features Azure Boards It allows you to track features, user stories, tasks, and bugs associated with your project. You can also customize your dashboards and track progress easily during your project lifecycle. Azure Pipelines A CI/CD service that helps you build and test your code automatically. Enables you to deploy your [...]
Azure Serverless
Azure Serverless Cheat Sheet Enables you to build applications without managing infrastructure. Azure Functions Enables you to run a small piece of code to do a task. A single task is performed for each invocation. Supported languages: C#, Java, JavaScript, Python, and PowerShell You can run your code based on the HTTP requests or schedule when your function runs. You are only charged for the time you run your [...]
Azure Machine Learning
Azure Machine Learning Cheat Sheet A service to train, deploy, automate, manage, and track machine learning models. Azure ML offers Basic and Enterprise editions. You can use Azure ML SDK for Python, Azure ML Studio, and ML CLI to manage your deployed models. You can automate and accelerate the ML lifecycle using MLOps. Azure ML designer allows you to visually connect (drag-and-drop) datasets and modules without writing any code. [...]
Azure Big Data
Azure Big Data Cheat Sheet A service to store and process large amounts of data sets. Use Azure Data Lake Analytics to write queries that help you transform your data and extract valuable insights. Offers dynamic scaling and data parallelism. You can integrate Data Lake Analytics with Active Directory to manage users’ permissions. Create big data clusters for Hadoop, Spark, and Kafka with Azure HDInsight. Reduce costs by scaling [...]
Azure Internet of Things (IoT)
Bookmarks Azure IoT Hub Azure IoT Central Azure Sphere Azure IoT Products Validate Your Knowledge Azure IoT Cheat Sheet A service that allows you to connect, monitor, and control one or more IoT devices that can communicate with back-end services hosted in the cloud. Azure IoT Hub A PaaS solution that provides complete control over the collection and processing of IoT [...]
Azure Compliance Manager
Azure Compliance Manager Cheat Sheet A dashboard and monitoring tool that summarizes data protection, compliance score, and recommendations. It allows you to assign, track, and record compliance and assessment-related activities. Recommendations for industry regulations: GDPR, ISO, and NIST You can upload and manage artifacts or evidence in a secure repository. Want to learn more about Azure? Watch the official Microsoft Azure YouTube channel's video series called Azure Tips and [...]
Microsoft Sentinel
Microsoft Sentinel Cheat Sheet A cloud-native SIEM and SOAR solution. It offers a birds-eye view across your enterprise. Sentinel is an intelligent security analytics and threat intelligence service that provides alert detection, threat visibility, proactive hunting, and threat response. Data connection methods in Sentinel: Service to service integration, External solutions via API, and External solutions via an agent. Microsoft Sentinel roles: Reader, Responder, and Contributor. Threat Management Sentinel provides [...]
Azure Database Migration Service
Azure Database Migration Service Cheat Sheet Accelerates the migration of your data to Azure. Enables seamless migrations from multiple database sources. To perform an online migration, you need to create an instance based on the premium pricing tier. Features Migrates your database and server objects with minimal downtime. Supports Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Oracle migration to Azure from on-premises and other cloud providers. You can use [...]
Azure SQL
Bookmarks Monitoring Networking Security Pricing Validate Your Knowledge Azure SQL Cheat Sheet A fully managed database built upon the SQL Server engine. SLA durability up to 99.995%. SQL Databases Resource type: Single Database - offers serverless and hyperscale storage (up to 100TB). Elastic Pool - a collection of databases with a shared set of resources. Database Server - manage groups of [...]
Azure Traffic Manager
Azure Traffic Manager Cheat Sheet A DNS-based traffic load balancer. Improves the responsiveness of your applications by sending the request to the closest endpoint. It offers a range of traffic-routing methods and endpoint monitoring options. Features It is resilient to failure. You can obtain actionable insights about your users using a traffic view. Improve the availability of your applications by using traffic manager health checks. Offers automatic failover when [...]
Azure Content Delivery Network
Bookmarks Features How Caching Works Pricing Limits Azure Content Delivery Network Cheat Sheet A distributed network of servers that delivers web content closer to users. CDNs store cache content on edge servers to minimize end-user latency. Features Improves the performance of dynamic web pages using dynamic site acceleration. You can set two types of caching rules in Azure CDN: Global caching rule [...]
Azure Application Gateway
Azure Application Gateway Cheat Sheet A web traffic load balancer. It allows you to distribute incoming traffic based on HTTP request properties such as URL and host headers. Application gateway has four tiers: Standard, Standard V2, WAF, and WAF v2 You can use the same application gateway for up to 100+ websites with multi-site hosting. Set the minimum and maximum scale units based on your needs. Azure Application Gateway [...]
Azure VPN Gateway
Bookmarks Routing Connection Resiliency Pricing Validate Your Knowledge Azure VPN Gateway Cheat Sheet A secured hybrid cloud architecture. It is composed of gateway subnet, tunnel, and on-premises gateway. Protocols: Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) and Internet Key Exchange (IKE) VPN gateway connections: VNet-to-VNet, Site-to-Site, and Point-to-Site Create a secure connection from your on-premises network to an Azure virtual network with a site-to-site VPN. [...]
Azure Load Balancer
Bookmarks Features Concepts Pricing How to Create a Load Balancer Validate Your Knowledge Azure Load Balancer Cheat Sheet Distributes incoming network traffic across multiple targets. Allows you to route traffic based on source IP address and port to a destination IP address and port. Features The load balancer supports TCP/UDP-based protocols. Scales automatically as traffic increases. The load-balancing decision is based [...]
Azure Container Registry
Bookmarks Features Concepts Best Practices Tasks Tagging Network Security Pricing Azure Container Registry Cheat Sheet A service to manage your container images and related artifacts. ACR is a regional service. Features Keep track of current valid container images. Registries (SKUs) are available in three tiers: Basic, Standard, and Premium. You can use the geo-replication feature of Premium registries [...]
