Author: Frederique Retsema

You probably know how this works: you start learning AWS, get a free tier account, work with it – play with it (yes, really, AWS is toys for adults). …

Introduction Some time ago my colleague informed me that AWS announced a new feature : starting containers faster with AWS Fargate. The idea is to start the container before …

Introduction A few weeks ago I published a blog about secret rotation , I used the default Lambda functions for single user and multi users that are maintained by …

Introduction AWS Secrets Manager was released in 2018. It is a nice replacement for secret strings in the SSM Parameter Store. With Secrets Manager it is possible to automate …

Introduction I used LastPass for several years, and it helped me a lot to access my passwords and secrets on any moment, from multiple devices, in a secure way. …

Up to now, it was not very easy to see what resources you have in an AWS account. One of the ways to solve this was to enable the …

Last week I passed for my RHCSA exam (EX200) . While I was studying for the exam, I asked myself which parts of this exam are still relevant when …

I like to do presentations about a lot of topics. Most of these presentations are recorded and the link to that recording is then shared to people who couldn’t …

Introduction It is possible in AWS to check if your environment is compliant to your minimum standards. It is also possible to automatically change the environment to make it …

Script to stop the execution of CloudFormation when you made a small error in a custom resource (Lambda function).

In this blog post, I will show how you can install the OWASP training tools WebGoat, WebWolf and JuiceShop on your local laptop using Vagrant.

Introduction Some time ago, I wrote about the new preview feature in Azure Automation Accounts to use Managed Identities . I think that it is useful to migrate to …

Introduction I think that every production environment in Azure uses Automation Accounts for f.e. scheduled tasks. Up to recently, you were forced to use the Run As user to …

Learning a new cloud can be frighting: do I configure this right? And, when I click here, don’t I end up with a huge bill at the end of …

Introduction I looked into virtual network peering peering in Azure and I saw something that looked rather strange to me. Let me explain what it was, how VNet peering …

Adding a user in Azure Active Directory caused some troubles: it didn’t work as I thought it would. Let me explain. Adding the user I went to Azure Active …

When I was learning about Azure AI, I asked myself the question: “how far is AI? What can it determine – and what is impossible (yet)?” A nice tool …

In this blog, I will show how you can use the SAM (Serverless Application Model) to get a presigned upload URL to AWS S3 that can be used exactly …

In this blog I will show how you can use the SAM (Serverless Application Model) to get a presigned upload URL to AWS S3 that can be used exactly …

In this blog, I will show how you can use the SAM (Serverless Application Model) to get a presigned upload URL to AWS S3 that can be used exactly …

It is the end of the year: time to look back, time to look forward. In the past year, I had a lot of extra time because of the …

In June I wrote a blog series about the AWS Shop Example. In this series, I also wrote about X-Ray . I like X-Ray: you can see how much …

It took me a while, but then this blog series was ready: five blog articles about Windows Failover Clustering and Auto Scaling Groups with one node. I was happy, …

You might have wondered in the second blog of this series , why I mentioned the possibility that the Task Scheduler didn’t start after a reboot in the “on-premise” …

Introduction If you follow along in this blog series , I can imagine that if you deployed the CloudFormation scripts, that you think “wow, how does it work”. In …

Introduction In the previous two blogs , I showed that it is is possible to implement a Windows Failover Cluster in AWS. In this blog, I will explain the …

Introduction In the previous blog I showed the different solutions that there are to migrate an on-premise Windows Failover Cluster environment to AWS. I also showed how fast (or …

Introduction In this series, I will look at the migration from on-premise Windows Failover Clusters to AWS. What is the difference in recovery times between the application on-premise, the …

Introduction We are in production with our shop example . We’d like to get some statistics about our implementation: how often are the Lambda functions called? How fast are …

Introduction Our shop example is now in production, wohoo!!! When you are using our example program in production, you might see that some sales are updated multiple times in …

Introduction When you follow along in this series , you might have been irritated by the amount of work to test your functions. It isn’t a problem to test …

Introduction In the previous blog, I talked about unit tests of the AWS Shop example . Today, I will continue with a smoke test and a performance test. Smoke …

Introduction In the last six blogs , I showed you an application that used AWS to process the sales from a cashing machine. This series continues with tests for …

Introduction Last time, I talked about the API Gateway . The URL that we used last time has randomness in it: it looks like https://54dwcigu3a.execute-api.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/prod/shop. When you destroy the …

Introduction You might have noticed that we skipped the API Gateway up to now . I will write two blogs about the API Gateway. In this one, we follow …

Introduction The ultimate goal of our shop application is to update the AMIS-shop table in the DynamoDB service. In this blog, I will tell a little bit more about …

Introduction Today we’ll look at the AWS Simple Notification Service. We have two of them in our shop: one to get messages from the accept-lambda function and send them …

Introduction In the previous blog , I wrote about an example shop application in AWS. Let me show the AWS architecture of this shop again: In this blog, I …

Introduction I have to admit: I love serverless. Serverless computing is using the cloud as it is supposed to be used: it scales up when you need more capacity, …

Yesterday I published a blog about AWS policies. We used the IAM wizard to create a policy. When you try to use this policy with the users we created, …