History Over the last few years AWS has branched out into building their own ARM based processor named Graviton and also to providing instances powered by other x86_64/AMD64 architectures, namely AMD EPYC processors. In late 2019, they also introduced their second generation Graviton2 processor. Though, this isn’t the first time AWS has used AMD processors. If you have been around AWS for a while you may remember in about 2011/2012, you used to be able to order an m1 instance family. Read more

I’ve been starting to use CDK over the last few months. It’s a really powerful way to describe your infrastructure. I’m specifically been using Python, so much of what I discuss here will be in Python where I need to reference languages. One of the things that I really liked about it, is that creating MVPs or PoCs can be really quick as there are high level constructs available out of the box. Read more

Following on from the previous post, I needed to setup some basic alerting and dashboards. Opsgenie is being used for paging, but anything that can integrate with SNS will work well. I’ll walk through here how to create alerts in CloudWatch from the metrics, and a basic dashboard using CloudFormation. I have done a quick bit of maths and if you are using this approach, it will cost about US$6.00 per instance. Read more

If you are migrating to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and are looking to use newer instance types (specifically t3a) then you need to make sure that you have a number of modules loaded automatically. I’ve been migrating some Oracle Linux 7 hosts to AWS using CloudEndure and on the first trial run, I couldn’t work out why they were booting OK in the AWS EC2 console, but I couldn’t connect to them. Read more

We currently have a customer that has a legacy application that needs to be able to fail between two nodes (think old school clustering) their application, and can really only talk to it via an IP address. Since DNS is not possible, I needed a solution to move a single IP address from one node to the other. Also, this is Windows. This point is important because I’ve previously done something similar on Linux a long time ago. Read more