Category: Technical How-to

AWS customers use AWS Systems Manager to view and control their infrastructure on AWS. Using the AWS Systems Manager console, they can view operational data from multiple AWS services and automate operational tasks across AWS resources. AWS Systems Manager helps you maintain security and compliance by scanning your managed instances. It also reports on (or […]

Are you a license administrator who wants to manage software licenses from different vendors as you build your cloud infrastructure across multiple AWS Regions? If so, you can use AWS License Manager to gain control and visibility into license usage. In this blog post, we discuss a solution that integrates AWS License Manager with AWS […]

In today’s world of DevOps, continuous deployments, and data-driven decisions, we are gathering more and more data from our applications.  From metrics to logs to traces to time series data the volume of information being collected is growing at an exponential rate.  This enormous amount of data is causing us to rethink traditional approaches to […]

UPDATE (15 Dec 22): AWS AppConfig released an Agent for containers (EKS, ECS, Docker, Kubernetes) in December 2022, which makes calling AppConfig much simpler from containerized applications. We recommend using the AppConfig Agent for containers instead of the method below. Read the Agent documentation.   AWS AppConfig is a capability of AWS Systems Manager that you […]

Many customers implement business processes as batch workloads. End-to-end visibility into those workloads can help you identify bottlenecks in the batch jobs. In this blog post, I will show how to configure AWS X-Ray for your AWS Batch workloads in an automated way and present a sample application to visualize the collected X-Ray traces. AWS Batch is a […]

Since 2014, AWS Trusted Advisor has been providing customers with visibility into an individual AWS account and providing recommendations based on known AWS best practices. Trusted Advisor makes recommendations to help customers achieve a better security posture, control their costs, optimize application performance, design better fault tolerance, and maintain control over their AWS service limits […]

Many of you have experience using AWS CloudFormation to automate your application deployments. As you probably know, the service supports around 600 types of resources. When you optimize your templates, you might have discovered that each of those resource types encapsulates native AWS SDK API calls to create or update each resource’s state or configuration. You […]

AWS would like to introduce you to the RDKLib, an open source Python library you can use to build, develop, and deploy custom AWS Config rules at scale. RDKLib works with the AWS Config Rule Development Kit. It is designed to work at the AWS Lambda layer, so you can use the library without needing […]

Oftentimes we find customers who want to extend their AWS CloudFormation templates by running a few lines of code during template execution. For example, to call an external API. In these cases, customers were directed to use either custom resources, resource types, or macros to accomplish the task. This is such a common pattern that […]

Amazon WorkSpaces is a fully managed virtual desktop environment that runs on AWS. It provides users with desktop cloud-based Microsoft Windows and Linux solutions that can be customized and configured to run seamlessly with your organization. In this blog post, I show you how to install software onto a running WorkSpace using AWS Systems Manager, […]