Several weeks ago, a provisioning error inside Google’s Cloud Platform (GCP) accidentally deleted the account of UniSuper, an Australian pension fund with over 165 billion in assets (USD) and 620,000 users. The outage lasted until data could be restored from another cloud provider which acted as a backup repository for UniSuper’s applications and data. When the GCP account was deleted all data including the GCP …
Author: mhonner
AWS and RAID
Reading some AWS docs the other day and found something interesting. It’s possible to create RAID Level 0 and 1 EBS volumes for your EC2 instances. It doesn’t provide multi-zone failover like EFS, but Level 0 would be great for a database not supported by RDS. The throughput of the Level 0 EBS volumes attached to the instance is the sum of throughput of all …
AWS Global Accelerator
AWS has a powerful tool which uses AWS’s global network to accelerate access to EC2 instances, databases and other resources collectively referred to as endpoints. Suppose I deploy a website in the Virginia region, a request to that website must do the DNS walk through a chain of routers that are independent of AWS’s backbone. This involves a lot of hopping especially when you’re far …
AWS Bill – 10k a month !
Just finished working with a client who had setup a straightforward AWS account with several web servers, a database server … the usual. He had run all the cost analyzers for server size, instance types and reserved versus on demand contracts. His bill should have been about $1500/month, but when he checked halfway through the month on his costs, he was on track to spend …
Apache & Linux
This was a tricky problem. A retail ecommerce site was having performance problems during the holiday season on a linux instance at AWS. The server itself was beefy enough – 8 vcpus and 32 GB of memory. Also, plenty of storage – 300 GB SSD disk with provisioned IOPS at the right scale to disk size. The server kept throwing errors as if it were …
Celebrating 20 years !
It’s hard to believe but I am celebrating my 20th year in business. Many thanks to my clients and associates who have made this possible.
AWS Lambda
This seems really powerful especially the number of AWS tools and API’s. Without it we’d have a state machine running on an EC2 instance to orchestrate all the tasks. On other hand, they sort of remind me of triggers in Oracle. Triggers are similiar to Lambda in the sense that respond to changes to data in tables, so, event driven like Lambda. But, wow, I …
AWS doesn’t secure your instances, you do.
This is a post (which I anonymized for posting purposes) just placed on an AWS experts board. “…. This past July the aws server was hacked and Ransomwared. There was a snapshot to restore from, but it was a few weeks old, so, reluctantly, we went through all the many hoops of paying them in Bitcoin. It took several weeks to go through the process …
The standard OS Patch for AWS is not enough to secure your linux instance.
The best practice when deploying an AWS linux instance is to run sudo yum update. This downloads and patches the OS and any applications with the latest updates. I put this to the test by deploying two standard AMI instances. One of the instances I updated, the other I did not. I ran a vulnerability scan against both instances using the CVE 1-1, AWS Security …
AWS and HIPPA compliance.
AWS’s infrastructure is HIPAA compliant, but this does not mean the solutions you’ve deployed are. AWS’s shared responsiblity model means their infrastructure is secured, but you can easily build and deploy non-compliant solutions. If you are storing PII data in the health care field, your AWS deployments must be reviewed and secured to ensure compliance.