Head for the Cloud

Keeping the Cloud simple.

Generating cloudwatch alarms using 'metric math' via CloudFormation and Terraform.

2023-11-27 7 min read AWS Terraform CloudFormation IaC Simon Hanmer
I spend a lot of time working as a consultant with GlobalLogic UK&I with different client teams to deploy AWS infrastructure, and not surprisingly, I see differing levels of maturity and experience within these teams. While we work with teams with a lot of knowledge, often they concentrate on deploying the applications and infrastructure, but they won’t think about how they can understand how well an application is working. This is an important aspect of working within the Cloud, usually termed monitoring or observability. Continue reading
Terraform CloudFormation Observability

Use VSCode to write Terraform? AWS AI can now help you write your code!

2023-11-27 5 min read AWS Terraform Simon Hanmer
As I sit here writing this article, AWS’s annual re:Invent is just starting in Las Vegas. This huge event pulls together cloud enthusiasts from around the world to learn about the largest cloud providers offerings. Not surprisingly, AWS use this time to announce new and improved services, and we’ll see hundreds of articles over the next week - in fact, there are so many announcements, they have to start drip-feeding them out in advance of the main event. Continue reading
Terraform VSCode CodeWhisperer AI reInvent

Reviewing AWS SSM DHMC - too many acronyms or a useful tool?

2023-05-11 8 min read AWS Simon Hanmer
AWS Systems Manager (SSM) is an integral component for managing EC2 and other compute fleets, offering capabilities such as patch management, parameter store, and managing changes across a fleet of servers. It also offers a service called Session Manager allowing secure, audited access to EC2 instances without needing to expose the instances on the Internet. In February 2023, AWS announced a new solution called Default Host Management Configuration or DHMC, to simply the setup of the core SSM capabilities by providing a method of ensuring that SSM was available for all instances in an account. Continue reading
DHMC SSM SSH IAM Terraform Walkthroughs

Hosting a Hugo static website in AWS

2023-03-07 8 min read AWS Terraform Hugo Simon
This post is part of a series about hosting a static website, and I’ll be talking about the infrastructure needed to host the website in AWS, and how to deploy via infrastructure as code (IaC). In this post, we’ll use Terraform to describe the infrastructure we want to deploy Our infrastructure I use Hugo to run this blog - it generates static HTML pages based on files written with Markdown which means that I don’t need to worry about running servers. Continue reading
CloudFront Route53 ACM S3 IAC Hugo Terraform Walkthroughs
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