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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Using AWS EventBridge to avoid getting Lost in Translation

Don’t rewrite your code, rewrite your data with EventBridge Input Transformation!

Hosting a Hugo static website in AWS

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. To host this blog, I deploy several resources into an AWS account to host this blog, as shown below:

Creating and validating ACM certificates with Terraform

This post is part of a series about hosting a static website, specifically a Hugo-based blog hosted in AWS but this process is useful anytime we need to create a SSL certificate in Amazon Certificate Manager (ACM).