Category: Learning Levels

This post was written in collaboration with Ryan Walker, a Principal Engineer with the Solutions and Services Engineering team at Rackspace. Now that cloud technology has become ubiquitous, companies have many options for hosting servers and building out solutions. From the use of multiple cloud providers to bare metal devices to private cloud, or even […]

In June 2021, the Amazon CloudWatch team launched 14 new metric math functions. In this blog post, I’ll describe these new functions and show how you can use them to enhance your existing CloudWatch metrics, dashboards, and alarms. Metrics are an important part of observability and monitoring. A numerical representation of data measured over time, […]

In this post, I’ll explain how to create fine-grained canary schedules to meet your business requirements using built-in cron expression scheduling in Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics. You can use CloudWatch Synthetics to create canaries, configurable scripts that run on a schedule, to monitor your endpoints and APIs. Because canaries follow the same routes and perform the […]

In the first three posts in this five-part series, I introduced you to AWS Launch Wizard Systems Manager Automation documents for SQL Server and showed you how to run the AWSSQLServer-Backup, AWSSQLServer-Restore, and AWSSQLServer-Index Automation documents. In this post, I’ll show you how to use the AWSSQLServer-DBCC document for SQL Server to execute database consistency […]

In the first and second posts in this five-part series, I introduced you to AWS Launch Wizard Systems Manager Automation documents for SQL Server and showed you how to run the AWSSQLServer-Backup and AWSSQLServer-Restore Automation documents. In this post, I’ll show you how to use the AWSSQLServer-Index document for SQL Server index maintenance. The SQL […]

In the first post in this five-part series, I introduced you to AWS Launch Wizard Systems Manager Automation documents for SQL Server and showed you how to run the AWSSQLServer-Backup document. In this second post, I’ll show you how to restore a SQL Server backup from Amazon S3 using the AWSSQLServer-Restore document. The SQL Server […]

This is the first in a five-part series to introduce you to AWS Launch Wizard Systems Manager Automation documents for SQL Server. AWS maintains these predefined Automation documents, which you can use to perform critical maintenance tasks for SQL Server, including backup, restore, reindex, and DBCC. In this post, I will describe the purpose of […]

In parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 of this five-part series, I introduced you to AWS Launch Wizard Systems Manager Automation documents for SQL Server and showed you how to run the AWSSQLServer-Backup, AWSSQLServer-Restore, AWSSQLServer-Index, and AWSSQLServer-DBCC Automation documents. In this last post of the series, I’ll introduce you to Maintenance Windows, a powerful tool […]

In this blog post, we will show how you can use AWS Config custom rules with Open Policy Agent (OPA) to evaluate the compliance of your AWS resources. AWS Config enables you to assess, audit, and evaluate the configuration of your AWS resources. The service continuously monitors and records your AWS resource configurations and allows […]

In an earlier blog post, Automate customized deployment of cross-account/cross-region CloudWatch dashboards using tags, we showed you how to implement Amazon CloudWatch dashboards for specific events with automation. This solution is great for seasonal events, holidays, important releases, and other use cases. In this blog post, we will review a landing zone environment and share a […]