Blog

How to Change or Upgrade an EC2 Instance Type

  • 8 min read

EC2, or Elastic Compute Cloud, is Amazon Web Services IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) offering – essentially it is a service for running virtual machines in the AWS cloud.  I wrote an earlier post about EC2 and all the different instance types titled AWS EC2 – Everything You Need To Know About EC2 Instances which touched on some of the pre-requisites for changing EC2 instance types – I’ll cover that again here and then take a deeper dive on how to… Read More »How to Change or Upgrade an EC2 Instance Type

Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) is the favourite PaaS Kubernetes Orchestration Tool!

  • 8 min read

The World is going crazy for containers and Kubernetes right now.  Container adoption is on the rise – according to the ‘Flexera 2020 State of the Cloud‘ report, containers are now mainstream, with 65% of respondents using Docker for containers, and 58% using Kubernetes: In addition to the significant level of adoption, 51% of respondents said that increasing the use of containers was one of their top cloud initiatives for 2020 – in fact this was the 3rd ranked cloud… Read More »Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) is the favourite PaaS Kubernetes Orchestration Tool!

AWS Snowball: What Does Amazon’s Import/Export Appliance Cost?

  • 8 min read

AWS Import Export with Snowball Originally a single device used for migrating data into AWS, Snowball is now part of the AWS Snow family of services used for both speeding up data import and export to and from AWS, and for secure edge computing. The AWS Snowball family includes: AWS Snowball Edge Storage Optimized AWS Snowball Edge Compute Optimized AWS Snowmobile  The AWS Snow family can import and export exabytes of data into and out of AWS.  Snow family devices… Read More »AWS Snowball: What Does Amazon’s Import/Export Appliance Cost?

Cloud Computing Scalability

Scalability in Cloud Computing & Why We Love AWS

  • 10 min read

In this post we’ll take a look at one of the key benefits of Cloud Computing – Scalability.  We’ll explore the different scaling options available for your cloud based workloads, and then we’ll take a look at specific services in AWS which can help you to achieve scalability for your AWS hosted applications.   Whether you’re starting out with a single instance and hoping to grow, or you have a globally distributed application, you always need to be factoring scalability into… Read More »Scalability in Cloud Computing & Why We Love AWS

AWS DynamoDB vs MongoDB: A NoSQL Comparison

  • 10 min read

In this post we explore 2 giants of the NoSQL Database world – DynamoDB from Amazon Web Services, and MongoDB.   We’ll take a look at what NoSQL actually means, then examine the  2 different offerings, looking at the pros & cons of each.  Each of course has their advantages and disadvantages – your choice is likely to be guided by your long term cloud strategy and the specific requirements of your application. First up, what exactly is NoSQL? What is… Read More »AWS DynamoDB vs MongoDB: A NoSQL Comparison

AWS Reliability Pillar

AWS Reliability – A Core Pillar of Your Architecture

  • 8 min read

In this post I’m going to give an overview of the AWS Well Architected Framework, then give a deep dive on the Reliability pillar, which is one of the 5 core pillars that should underpin your AWS architecture. AWS Well Architected Framework The AWS Well Architected Framework is a series of best practise principles, designed by AWS, to help customers compare their AWS environments against these best practises and identify areas for improvement.  The Framework is based on the extensive… Read More »AWS Reliability – A Core Pillar of Your Architecture

AWS Microservices: Architecture, Use Cases, Scaling & More

  • 8 min read

We’ve all heard the terms crop up in conversation, monoliths & microservices – but what exactly do they mean?  How exactly do we ‘break up the monolith’? In this post we’ll explore the differences between monolothic and microservices based applications, and highlight some of the benefits of microservices. We’ll also explore what services AWS have available to help you to build out a microservices architected application on the AWS cloud. Microservices Basics – What are Microservices? Microservices, or microservices architecture,… Read More »AWS Microservices: Architecture, Use Cases, Scaling & More

5 New Features in AWS Fargate Version 1.4

  • 3 min read

What is AWS Fargate? AWS Fargate is a serverless computing engine for containers that enables customers to deploy and manage applications, not infrastructure.  Fargate works with Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and enables customers to deploy container based applications without having to provision EC2 instances or Kubernetes pods. AWS Fargate launches and scales compute resources for containers, ensuring that they have the optimal amount of resource available to run customer’s applications.  This ensures that… Read More »5 New Features in AWS Fargate Version 1.4

Amazon Detective – Now Generally Available

  • 4 min read

This week, AWS announced general availability of Amazon Detective.  To save you doing the detective work to figure out what Amazon Detective can do for you, I’ve outlined everything you need to know. What is Amazon Detective? Amazon Detective is a new log analytics and visualization service that helps AWS customers identify and investigatesecurity issues across their AWS workloads and accounts.  Amazon Detective collects log data from various sources including: AWS CloudTrail (logs aws account activity) Amazon VPC Flow Logs… Read More »Amazon Detective – Now Generally Available

Combat Covid-19 With 3 Free AWS Homeworking Solutions

  • 5 min read

It’s fair to say that the world was unprepared for a global pandemic such as Covid-19.  We’ve seen outbreaks in the past – SARS, Ebola, but nothing that has spread so quickly and with such far reaching consequences.  Bill Gates told us in 2015 that we were not ready for such a global outbreak and he was right – all around the world healthcare systems are struggling to cope, and people are being told to work from home where possible.   If you… Read More »Combat Covid-19 With 3 Free AWS Homeworking Solutions