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Open Guide to Amazon Web Services

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31–40 of 133 posts

Re: Open Guide to Amazon Web Services

#31
post #8

The "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.

I would really, really appreciate if you would elaborate on this. Security seems to have the most unspoken community knowledge of anything I need to know.

Re: Open Guide to Amazon Web Services

#32
Thanks a lot for posting this, I went to a linux conference over the weekend and was talking with some friends about their datacenter jobs. I felt hopelessly lost in trying to understand all its intricacies at routing, storage, and backup levels where this guide gives a good bird's-eye view of the stacks.

Re: Open Guide to Amazon Web Services

#33
post #29

I still don't get why Opsworks is not getting more love? I guess people don't like Chef? Opsworks has enabled hassle free deployments for us over the past three years or so at no additional cost. :)

You could add more background on it into the guide. Just submit a PR! :-)

Re: Open Guide to Amazon Web Services

#34
Thanks, I like that Service Matrix[1] !

I've a few questions for AWS experts :

The only container orchestration that is open source seems to be Kubernetes. Is it easy to run on AWS?

What's the equivalent of Azure "Service Fabric" in the AWS world? (and in the Google Cloud?)

[1] https://github.com/open-guides/og-aws#service-matrix

Re: Open Guide to Amazon Web Services

#35
post #27

Does anyone here use x1.32xlarge instances? If so what kind of stuff are you doing with it? That thing looks beastly

My guess is that there are companies with "legacy" applications, that can't really be re-written into a distributed system, have a large footprint, but still need to be run.

The special sub-category of those are huge RDBMS instances - a pretty common choke point in growing companies with weaker engineering teams. Some of those companies would pay basically any price to keep those DBs running.

Re: Open Guide to Amazon Web Services

#36
A 15-minute scan read of this - specifically the sections on the stuff I've worked with the most - suggests this is a very, very good addition to the official documentation.

I would as a minimum recommend anybody/everybody considering AWS to read and think about the "When to use AWS" section. Whilst it is an excellent set of tools that have completely changed the economics of deploying software, there are times when you should use Google Cloud, times you should use bare metal, times you should use Heroku. AWS is a complex beast. Heroku is simple, but has limitations.

There are a bunch of apps I'm thinking about building at the moment where I realise a hybrid approach is best: some of GCP's stack, some of AWS', and a small amount of my own bare metal. Knowing when to choose which is not intuitive and comes with time, but there are big, big clues that will help the uninitiated in that section of this open guide.

Also, if you're looking to the future, the AWS Lambda and Google Functions stuff is perhaps the most exciting stuff to start building knowledge up of now if you're a developer, I think.

Re: Open Guide to Amazon Web Services

#38
I recommend you also make the content available on a one-topic-per-page format ASAP before someone else does and takes credit for it.

WHY: Google still doesn't handle anchor-links very well. You have 1000 amazing articles on a single page. Each section (e.g.: "High Availability on AWS") would be a great resource for someone searching on that topic in Google. But when you put it all on one page Google infers "1/1000th of this page is about high availability on AWS" and gives better rankings to a page that is 100% about high availability on AWS.

I'm sure it would be pretty simple to write a script that breaks up topics into individual pages. I love the style of having it all on one page but I think it would be a waste of your hard work not to get all this great writing in front of search.

Re: Open Guide to Amazon Web Services

#39
post #27

Does anyone here use x1.32xlarge instances? If so what kind of stuff are you doing with it? That thing looks beastly

I've temporarily scaled up to c4.8xlarge for a few hours every now and then to get some parallelized computations done quickly. Plays nicely with Clojure's (pmap) function.

Re: Open Guide to Amazon Web Services

#40
post #14
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Have the application retrieve a set of temporary credentials and use them." "In the case of Amazon EC2, IAM dynamically provides temporary credentials to the EC2 instance, and these credentials are automatically rotated for you." Attacker should only have access until creds are expired no ?
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