Wow, the link to http://www.ec2instances.info/ alone is so helpful. I wish I'd had this set of resources a year ago when I spent weeks trying to understand AWS' own documentation.
Open Guide to Amazon Web Services
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Re: Open Guide to Amazon Web Services
#12The "use IAM roles for EC2" recommendation is a bit sketchy. The current security zeitgeist, not just after Colin's post but also after DerbyCon and Black Hat, is that EC2 roles are dangerous and, when under attack, not very predictable.
Do you have links to the DerbyCon and Black Hat talks? And could you clarify what "when under attack, not very predictable" means?
Re: Open Guide to Amazon Web Services
#13Wow, this is a treasure chest of information. Bookmarked for sure.
Re: Open Guide to Amazon Web Services
#14The "use IAM roles for EC2" recommendation is a bit sketchy. The current security zeitgeist, not just after Colin's post but also after DerbyCon and Black Hat, is that EC2 roles are dangerous and, when under attack, not very predictable.
Do you have links to the DerbyCon and Black Hat talks? And could you clarify what "when under attack, not very predictable" means?
An attacker who compromises an EC2 instance can quietly grab the instance role credential and use it even after losing access to the instance itself.
Re: Open Guide to Amazon Web Services
#15One of the biggest lessons I've learned is that you need occasional EBS-to-EBS backups. Anyone that had to recover from snapshots knows the painful reason why...
Why is it painful recovering from snapshots? (have just moved to AWS so have not experienced this yet)
I get a lot of shit for not giving straight answers... just spin up an instance, put a gig of data on EBS drive, snapshot, create EBS from snapshot as if you were recovering, and try pulling 100+ megs of data off it... you'll never not keep EBS copies again. big clue: pre-warming
it will take you an hour to do, and you'll be years wiser
this is probably the number one reason people experience extra extra downtime when suffering from rebuild from whatever issue... and EBS volumes in certain regions can and will experience silent deaths
Re: Open Guide to Amazon Web Services
#16Wow, the link to http://www.ec2instances.info/ alone is so helpful. I wish I'd had this set of resources a year ago when I spent weeks trying to understand AWS' own documentation.
Right? I wish Amazon were just running a page like that themselves.
Re: Open Guide to Amazon Web Services
#17This is great. I've been working on AWS for close to 10 years now and an open guide is something I both need and want to contribute to.
Many of us have simple goals on AWS. The official AWS docs are thorough, but are too technical. There are blog posts about anything, they can be hard to find or get out of date.
I hope this open guide helps us all get our jobs done faster and easier!
Re: Open Guide to Amazon Web Services
#18The "use IAM roles for EC2" recommendation is a bit sketchy. The current security zeitgeist, not just after Colin's post but also after DerbyCon and Black Hat, is that EC2 roles are dangerous and, when under attack, not very predictable.
Thanks for the comment. Added an issue with this thread: https://github.com/open-guides/og-aws/issues/98
If you'd like to PR or discuss there it'd def help us cover this better.
Re: Open Guide to Amazon Web Services
#19Sadly, I could never get the company lawyers to approve contributions under a CC-BY-SA. Of course, I'm not 100% sure I could get them to approve contributions to any external repo due to liability concerns, etc.
Can you just contribute as you instead of as your company?
Re: Open Guide to Amazon Web Services
#20This is great. I've been working on AWS for close to 10 years now and an open guide is something I both need and want to contribute to. Many of us have simple goals on AWS. The official AWS docs are thorough, but are too technical. There are blog posts about anything, they can be hard to find or get out of date. I hope this open guide helps us all get our jobs done faster and easier!
Very glad to hear. Its this sentiment exactly that led us to get this started. We all have 100s of valuable tricks and gotchas we learn over the years, but 99% of the time fail to write down and share them helpfully. Do join us on Slack/GitHub and help us get your tips included, too.