Today I was setting up an application load balancer that sits in front of a test application I have put together. Setting this up was super easy, and very quickly I had my domain pointing to the alias and serving requests.

As part of the setup, I wanted to monitor the application load balancer to let me know when requests were failing to the downstream application (anything other than an HTTP 200) and so I set this up super easily in Amazon Cloudwatch. I now had monitoring and a nice dashboard that gave me the health of the application from the application load balancer perspective.

In this post I want to share four different approaches to installing and configuring your Amazon Aurora database clusters.

Everything in this post is covered in detail in the embedded video, but I wanted to share some additional information that I did not include in the video that was easier done in this blog.

{% youtube wZfh9PurE9E %}

Why four ways?

The approach in the video was to look at the journey you might take when learning a new technology and then how you move to productise that technology. One of the principal building blocks of creating modern applications is that you move to repeatable and reproducible environments and the move towards Infrastructure as Code.

Yesterday I was looking to import the TPC-H dataset (some 600 or so million rows) into Amazon Aurora from a workstation that I connect to using AWS Session Manager.

AWS Session Manager is a great way to simplify your life by allowing you to connect to a machine via the AWS console and not worry about having to manage ssh keys or remembering to lock down external public access from the net. I find myself using this when I need to do sysadmin-y things, and just makes managing your bastion hosts just that bit simpler.

Updated on Jan 18th to remove broken link to report

According to a number of recent studies, the use and adoption of open source software continues to rise. From studies such as the State of Enterprise Open Source by Red Hat (in which nearly 70% of respondents stated that open source software is either extremely or very important) or TideLift’s April 2019 survey report (that found more than 90% of professional developers use open source in building their applications) it is clear that developers from startups to highly regulated enterprises have embraced open source solutions. These reports and others show that the use of open source code and components in projects is increasing.

update-July 28th

The ssosync tool has had a lot of interest and the community has updated the tool. This means that you should refer to the project home page https://github.com/awslabs/ssosync and check out the README.md for what changes you might need to make to get this tool working.

Next level ssosync

In a previous post, I talked about setting up AWS Single Sign On (AWS SSO) with G-Suite, and then using an open source project called ssosync to syncronise users and groups from G-Suite into AWS SSO. You can take a look at that post here.

update-July 28th

The ssosync tool has had a lot of interest and the community has updated the tool. This means that you should refer to the project home page https://github.com/awslabs/ssosync and check out the README.md for what changes you might need to make to get this tool working.

Enabling AWS SSO with Google G-Suite

Many customers have existing directory technologies where they manage their users, and then use this central identity store as a way to simplify the way they authenticate and provide access to applications and other resources. Those directories might be something like Microsoft’s Active Directory or Google’s G-Suite. For example, I have a G-Suite setup for the lovely people in my house as we collaborate using the various tools it provides. We each have our own account (person@mydomain) which is managed by the G-Suite Admin function.

Some recent experiences mentoring has provided the motivation for this piece. It is not intended to be right or wrong, but just my personal opinion and experience and I hope it is read that way. I have put this together to share what I think are the critical things that make a mentoring relationship work for both the mentor and mentee. So with that out of the way, I invite you to read on…

As I reflect on 2019, one of the common themes whilst engaging with builders at the start of their career, has been how do those of us who have deep experience working in the IT industry and technology help bring those who are just starting out?

Some common themes when talking that have come up include;

• How do I get started on Cloud or AWS?
• What tools and languages should I learn?
• How do I get a job working on xx technology?
• I am not sure which area of IT to focus on, how did you know what to do?

Earlier on in my career, I was lucky enough to be mentored by a couple of excellent mentors and it really helped me become more in control of my career and more invested in the decisions I made. Now in the third decade of working in this great industry, and having been fortunate in having worked across many geographies, technologies and customers, I feel that it might be useful to share that experience with the less experienced folk coming into (or wanting to come into) this amazing industry.

So here is a list scraped from Twitter and following various other folk, of just a small taster of the workshops that ran during reInvent. As I find more I will update, and feel free to add yours in the comments (oh, and let me know if any of these are dead links)

Serverless - https://github.com/aws-samples/aws-serverless-workshop-innovator-island/ Serverless image process workshop - https://image-processing.serverlessworkshops.io/ Amplify preductions workshop - https://github.com/mlabieniec/IonicPredictions Full stack serverless Amplify lab - https://github.com/aws-samples/aws-reinvent-2019-mobile-workshops/tree/master/MOB303 Auth and Authorization flows in IOS apps - https://amplify-ios-workshop.go-aws.com/ Building a modern application with CDK - https://github.com/aws-samples/aws-modern-application-workshop/tree/python-cdk Using SAM CLI workshop - https://github.com/aws-samples/reinvent2019-svs217 Event driven workshop - https://event-driven-architecture.workshop.aws/

Very humbled to write a guest post on Adrian Hornsby excellent blog where he provides guidance to help customers build resilient architecture and champions operational excellence.

In this post I talk about what you need to think about to build a more resilient business fit for the digital age.

Here is the link: https://medium.com/@adhorn/make-your-business-more-resilient-in-the-digital-age-888da3f5deaf