AWS DevOps & Developer Productivity Blog

AWS CloudFormation simplifies provisioning on AWS. You can apply software engineering best practices such as version control, code reviews, unit tests, and continuous integration to the AWS CloudFormation templates, the same way you apply those best practices to your application code. For example, with application code, you can add descriptive comments to help you document various portions […]

Today Jeff Barr blogged about a new feature that gives users the ability to deploy and operate applications on existing Amazon EC2 instances and on-premises servers with AWS OpsWorks. You may know OpsWorks as a service that lets users deploy and manage applications. However OpsWorks can also perform operational tasks that simplify server management. This […]

AWS OpsWorks lets you deploy and manage application of all shapes and sizes. OpsWorks layers let you create blueprints for EC2 instances to install and configure any software that you want. This blog will show you how to create a custom layer for Docker. For an overview of Docker, see https://www.docker.com/tryit. Docker lets you precisely […]

Amazon CloudWatch Logs lets you monitor your applications and systems for operational issues in near real-time using your existing log files.  You can get started in just minutes using the Amazon CloudWatch Logs agent for Amazon Linux, CentOs, Redhat Linux and Ubuntu. In this blog post, we’ll show you how easy it is to get […]

Did you know that Elastic Beanstalk supports attaching and customizing ephemeral and EBS volumes to Elastic Beanstalk environments without the need for custom AMIs? This feature provides Elastic Beanstalk users with the ability to utilize: 1.     Ephemeral storage via instance store volumes available on the physical EC2 machine. See Instance Stores Available on Instance Types […]

Amazon CloudWatch Logs was announced last month in the US East (Northern Virginia) region. If you’re running an Elastic Beanstalk environment in us-east-1, this brief overview will describe how you can quickly and easily begin to use CloudWatch Logs to monitor your web server logs. We’ll follow the Elastic Beanstalk Developer Guide to configure an Elastic […]

AWS OpsWorks now allows users to define environment variables per application. Instead of creating a custom recipe and managing environment variables as Chef attributes, you define the environment variables on each app and OpsWorks takes care of securely storing and sending the environment variables from your OpsWorks app definition to your instances and adding them […]

A good practice for maintaining highly available applications is to monitor the metrics that impact performance and service levels. AWS OpsWorks includes built-in integration with 14 Amazon CloudWatch metrics, including load, CPU and memory, but you may also want to monitor other metrics such as disk space utilization or application-level metrics such as error rates. […]

Background AWS CloudFormation simplifies provisioning and management on AWS. You can templatize the service and application architectures you want, and have CloudFormation use the templates for quick and reliable provisioning of the services or applications as ‘stacks’. You can also easily update or replicate the stacks as needed. Inside the CloudFormation templates, you can configure the […]

It is often useful to be able to store log files in a central place for easy access and reporting. Amazon CloudWatch Logs is a new service that is designed to help you monitor, store, and access your system, application, and custom log files from Amazon EC2 instances. For example, you can monitor application logs […]