Well, it finally happened. I started a startup. It is called CloudNative. It turns out, humans don't scale. Well, at least I don't. I have thoroughly enjoyed consulting and helping clients for the last year and a bit. And writing open source code, recording video episodes, running the ... Read more

There comes a time when a good idea needs resources. That time has come. The time to build a team. I am looking for engineers who want to create the first AWS continuous deployment SaaS. I have been working on the Bakery for a little while now and have many ... Read more

I'd like to tell you about a project I have been working on. I believe deploying fully baked AMIs has so many advantages over half-baked or raw deployments where things happen at boot time, that I want to make it easy for everyone to do. Netflix have been doing ... Read more

At yesterday's Advanced AWS meetup on monitoring, someone asked if they need something like New Relic if they already have Stackdriver. My answers was "yes", but I wanted to dive deeper into why I think that. I consider there to be 3 different buckets/types of monitoring Infrastructure Application ... Read more

There are a few events worth checking out in March, so I though I should give you the heads up to get them on your calendar. The March 3rd event for the Advanced AWS Meetup is all about monitoring, and is hosted right in downtown San Mateo by the folks ... Read more

The January 2014 Advanced AWS Meetup in San Francisco is only 2 weeks away, and there are only 23 spaces left before we need to wait-list people. This meetup is a little bit special, because Ben Whaley, the AWS Infrastructure Lead at Anki, will be taking you though how they ... Read more

Originally, our screencast episodes were hosted on S3 and serve up using a generic HTML5 video tag. As an experiment, all videos are now available on YouTube, with each page using an embed. You can subscribe here: ... and the playlist for all episodes is here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist ... Read more

With Thanksgiving and the holiday season fast approaching, things are heating up in the kitchen. The best way to cook a turkey is to soak it in brine for a day before stuffing and putting it in the oven. No no, the best way to cook a turkey is deep ... Read more

There are many ways to build AMIs, and this episode will show you how to use the same process Netflix uses by using Aminator. We will then take it one step further, and build AMIs using the Ansible Provisioner as well.

This year's AWS re:invent conference was an amazing experience. My first Game Day, some excellent and long anticipated announcements by AWS, and the Answers for AWS logo (along with my pretty face) on the keynote big screen in front of 9000 attendees, and who knows how many on ... Read more

Day 1 of AWS re:invent 2013 included a fun idea called Game Day. Teams of 3 are given a small application to build using various services, they then give their opponents access to their account where the opponent is free to do whatever unthinkable evil is possible. Then it ... Read more

In the lead up to AWS re:invent 2013, our open source projects have received a few updates, so I thought it best to summarize them. NetflixOSS Anisble Playbooks There are now CloudFormation templates for more projects to make it as easy as possible to get started. Aminator has been ... Read more

Every EC2 instance has access to meta-data, which can be used in combination with cloud-init to automation processes as an instance boots. CloudFormation parameters add extra flexibility to passing data to instances, and this episode will show you how to use them all.

CloudFormation templates are great for automating the creation and destruction of AWS resources, but hand coding JSON is prone to errors and mistakes. A project called troposphere has been gaining traction and approaches writing CF templates a little differently. Instead of writing JSON, you create objects with the troposphere library ... Read more

By using reserved instances, you can save a substantial amount of money. This episode will show you how to determine the right type of reserved instance to buy.

By using Ansible in combination with AWS, you can achieve high levels of automation quickly and easily. This episode shows you how to install Ansible, configure the EC2 inventory plugin, perform ad-hoc tasks on instances, and how to write a few playbooks to automate processes.

Using lynx to browse the Hadoop web interfaces on an Elastic MapReduce cluster is cumbersome at best. These web interfaces were built for modern browsers, so this episode will teach you how to install and set up FoxyProxy to view EMR web interfaces directly in your web browser. You will also see this works with Ganglia, and with HBase.

Long, long ago, in a time almost forgotten, this seemed like a good idea: Over 15 different command line tools, each maintained separately for the various services AWS offered. This was a real pain because they used different languages including Java (Sun, Oracle or openjdk - your guess), Python, Ruby (for ... Read more

The AWS Trusted Advisor suggests that you always have recent snapshots of your EBS volumes. Here at Answers for AWS, we agree, and have released Backup Monkey to automate that process for you. Backup Monkey loops through all EBS volumes in a given region, and creates snapshots of them. It ... Read more

Making AMIs is easy with tools such as Aminator and Packer. And copying an AMI to another region is a single API call now. However, if you produce AMIs for the public, distributing them to all regions and making the AMIs and the underlying EBS Snapshots public is still fairly ... Read more

Aminator lets you bake an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) using a variety of provisioners including apt and yum. Now there is also an Ansible Provisioner. The PR for this should be merged in shortly. This means you can use your favorite Ansible playbook to configure a running instance, or to ... Read more

I have release a few AMIs for some of the NetflixOSS projects. Right now, there are AMIs for Asgard and Eureka in the three US regions. If you need the AMI in another region, please let us know. Asgard The Asgard AMI is called asgard-1.2-awsanswers-ubuntu-12.04-amd64-ebs-20130716-2158. Underneath, it is ... Read more

While we understand pretty quickly how much easier, cheaper and faster it is to get started with Amazon Web Services than with traditional data center providers, it is taking much longer for people to comprehend the power of AWS. Infrastructure is dynamic now, not static. Instead of talking to a ... Read more

When you go to bed at night, you turn off the lights. When you're the last to leave the office, you turn off the lights and lock the door. This is a good habit. Yet when the weekend comes, many companies keep development and testing servers running, sitting idle ... Read more