The Ambassador Lounge

AWS Certifications during Lockdown

Greg Cockburn Guy Morton — Fri, 05 Jun 2020 14:16:20 +1000

Companies are dealing with the challenging times in different ways. Greg and Guy interview employees from AC3 to see how they are using this time to gain AWS Certifications, how they are being supported and why certifications are important.

Hosts

Guests

Nadja Lorenz
Dinesh Sharma
Jesus Rodriguez
Sergey Nasonov
Mark Maughan

What's New in March 2020

Arjen Schwarz Jean-Manuel Becker Guy Morton — Sun, 12 Apr 2020 17:16:20 +1000

In this crossover with the new podcast from the Melbourne AWS User Group Arjen, Jean-Manuel, and Guy take a look at the announcements from AWS in March.

Hosts

Shownotes

COVID-19

Finally in Sydney

Serverless

Containers

EC2 & VPC

Security

Dev and Ops

Databases

AI / ML

Other cool stuff

The Cloud Security re:Invent Crossover

Arjen Schwarz Ashish Rajan — Sun, 22 Dec 2019 17:50:24 +1100

In a crossover event with the Cloud Security Podcast, Arjen and Ashish take a look at the security announcements that happened before and during re:Invent.

Hosts

Shownotes

I Think Breath Noise is an Interesting One

Arjen Schwarz Ryan Anderson — Sun, 15 Dec 2019 20:32:24 +1100

Both Arjen and Ryan got their hands on the new DeepComposer musical keyboards that AWS released and take a look at what it is and does in this episode recorded in person at re:Invent.

Hosts

Shownotes

re:Invent 2019 re:Cap

Arjen Schwarz Greg Cockburn — Sun, 08 Dec 2019 19:06:53 +1100

After everything has been announced, Arjen and Greg are joined by special guest Jaco to take a short look at some of their favorite announcements from this re:Invent.

Hosts

Guest

Jaco Olivier

Shownotes

I Do A Lot With CloudFormation

Arjen Schwarz Ian McKay — Sun, 01 Dec 2019 19:41:50 -0800

The day before re:Invent kicks off, we’re all anxiously awaiting what will be coming out. Arjen and Ian make some predictions about this, but before that discuss the recent major CloudFormation updates.

Hosts

Shownotes

Welcome to the Lounge

Arjen Schwarz Ben Bridts Rolf Koski — Tue, 19 Nov 2019 07:55:50 +1100

In this first episode, Arjen, Ben, and Rolf explain what the ambassador program and this podcast are about, before they discuss the new Savings Plan and the SSO Login capabilities of the AWS CLI v2.

Hosts

Shownotes

About Us

Wed, 23 Oct 2019 09:50:37 +1100

This site highlights the work of AWS APN Ambassadors and is the home for our podcast.

Disclaimer

Let’s get the obvious disclaimer out of the way. While most everything on this site is about AWS, and we are part of a program run by AWS, this site and our works (unless otherwise highlighted) are independent from AWS.

What is an APN Ambassador?

As mentioned on the official APN Ambassador page at AWS:

The APN Ambassador Program is a community of technical experts in the AWS Partner Network (APN) Consulting Partner community. APN Ambassadors are passionate about sharing their technical knowledge through public presentations, the creation of open source projects, and social media. APN Ambassadors possess multiple AWS certifications as well as in-depth AWS knowledge. As employees of APN Consulting Partners, they work closely with AWS Solution Architects to migrate, design, implement, and monitor AWS workloads

In less marketing-focused speech, this means that we know a lot of AWS and like to share our knowledge with the community.

This site came out as part of that. Originally envisioned as home for our Ambassador Lounge podcast, discussions quickly turned to having it serve a broader purpose.

Managing Your Instance Sessions

Arjen Schwarz — Wed, 23 Oct 2019 09:50:37 +1100

This is the second entry in a series of three posts about accessing your EC2 instances. The first entry concerned EC2 Instance Connect, and in this post I’ll discuss the awkwardly named AWS Systems Manager Session Manager.

As promised previously, this is the continuation of my series of posts about connecting to your EC2 instances on the CMD Solutions blog. You can read the first one here.

Connecting with EC2 Instance Connect

Arjen Schwarz — Thu, 03 Oct 2019 08:12:43 +1000

Many of us have probably built tools that allow someone to use their own SSH key to access a server; I know I have. Instance Connect is the AWS solution for this. It lets you upload a temporary key to an instance and then immediately connect to it. And for two of the options, you don’t even need to use your own key.

This is my first post on the CMD blog and is the first in a series of three concerned with connecting safely to an EC2 instance. In this first post I dive into the new-ish EC2 Instance Connect.

CMD Solutions is the AWS focused brand within Mantel Group, which DigIO (my employer) is also a part of. Because of my status as AWS APN Ambassador, I represent CMD as well. Which also means that for some of my blogposts¹, those focused on some small part of AWS for example, CMD is the better outlet. This is a good example of that.

At least those that I write as a representive of my company. Obviously, the best place for anything I write is right here ;). ↩︎

Racing towards Intelligent Automation

Arjen Schwarz — Wed, 02 Oct 2019 20:06:57 +1000

Working closely with our clients, we occasionally have the opportunity to do something a little bit outside of the norm. In this post, we (Declan and Arjen) were lucky enough to help out Belong with a fun learning event.

Last month my colleague and I got to run a DeepRacer event at the client we’re working at. This post shows what that was like, how we did it, and what lessons we learned.

CloudFormation Macros Workshop

Arjen Schwarz — Sun, 18 Aug 2019 22:34:54 +1000

In July I was lucky enough to be asked back to give a workshop at the Melbourne AWS Programming and Tools Meetup. This meetup is always a lot of fun as it’s all about going hands on. This workshop is now available on GitHub and you can work through it at your own pace.

DeepRacer: From Start to Finish

Arjen Schwarz — Wed, 07 Aug 2019 20:41:47 +1000

At the AWS User Group in Melbourne, which I help run, we recently got a DeepRacer track that we let our attendees use to test their models before the evening’s talks kick off. In order to introduce people to what is basically a small self-driving car, I gave a talk to show what DeepRacer is and how you can train your models for it.

If you prefer a written version, my original write-up after re:Invent is still valid. Otherwise, have a look at the below video.

ig.nore.me For 5 Minutes: AWS CodeBuild

Arjen Schwarz — Sun, 28 Jan 2018 18:18:54 +1100

A 5 minute introduction about AWS Codebuild. What is it, how does it work, and what are some of the good and less good things about it.

Video

Transcript

Hello people, and welcome to todays video. I’ll be covering AWS CodeBuild which is part of the AWS CodePipeline CI/CD chain.

What exactly is CodeBuild? In short, CodeBuild allows you to build your code from a variety of locations and then push the resulting artifacts up to an S3 bucket.

CodeBuild does this using Docker containers, and in fact it is very reminiscent of the way that Fargate works. When a build is run, CodeBuild will start an ENI within your VPC and connect a docker container to it. It then logs into this Docker container where it pulls in your source code, and then reads the commands you defined for it in what is called the buildspec. All the logs created by running the buildspec are pushed to CloudWatch and once the run is complete it will upload the artifacts to an S3 bucket. The last thing it then does is delete the container and ENI.

In theory this sounds good, so let’s have a look at how it works in practice. I will use one of my projects as a demo. This is written in Go and all we’ll try to achieve at this point is to have it correctly build a binary and upload it to S3.

I’ll select GitHub as the source, which I’ve already previously connected, and then use the project from my account. The clone depth we’ll keep at one. This is a new feature that speeds things up by not pulling in the complete history of your project. I’ll also set a webhook for automatic triggers. Next is selecting the container to build in. I’ll select the standard ones, but unfortunately it seems that this doesn’t support a modern version of Go, so instead let’s pick the standard Docker Hub version of Go 1.9. There are no special requirements for the containers, so you can use any Linux container you want.

Next is defining the buildspec, but this will be in the codebase so I’ll use the default settings.

As I want an artifact to be created, I’ll tell it to push to an S3 bucket. Keep in mind here that your build subnet needs access to it, and that while all buckets are shown in the drop down, you have to use one from the same region.

A service role is required to spin everything up, but I’ll let AWS use its default for that. Next is the VPC. I created a new VPC for this using the VPC wizard with public and private subnets, because there is a hard requirement that you build in a private subnet that has NAT enabled.

I’ll now tell it to zip up my artifacts but I’ll leave the other advanced settings to their defaults.

Then we have a quick review, create the project and then start the build. When starting the build I can make changes to some of the settings, but I’ll leave them as they are. In the build you can see that it shows the same information we just provided, and once it has spun up things this will include both the actual used subnet and ENI ID.

Unfortunately, it seems that I didn’t add my buildspec file yet so let’s go do that first. Looking at the file you can see that it’s separated into different sections. At the top are the phases, there are a total of 4 you can add here that are executed in order. Each phase has a list of commands that are in turn executed in order as well. The second part is the artifacts section, this allows you to define what files should be considered part of the artifact and are eventually uploaded to S3. One section that I didn’t use is the env section, or environment section, which allows you to set variables or even parameter-store objects. And the last optional section is cache that you use to define information about caching data between runs.

Now, let me quickly push this up to GitHub and as we turned on the webhook this should have triggered a build automatically. And indeed it has, as you can see this time everything went fine, and even the commit in GitHub has been updated to show this. And if I now create a pull request, you can see a similar check has taken place there.

The last thing I want to check is that it pushed the artifact up to S3. And here you can see a new folder with the build ID, and in there we find the expected zip file.

So, after running a successful build, let’s have a quick review.

First, unlike other build platforms you don’t have a good overview of the status of your various projects as you can only see their names. Secondly, while you can set up monitoring for failed builds, this doesn’t allow you to differentiate between projects.

And then there is the buildspec. When you compare what you can do here to other build systems it’s very limited. You can only run basic commands, and there is no way to see the details of things like unit tests unless you dig through the CloudWatch logs which aren’t really designed for that.

On the plus side, some of these issues are mitigated by using it as part of Code Pipeline. Additionally, it is easy to set up. You can hook it into other CI/CD systems, and the actual builds are cheap and pretty fast. And of course, it’s integrated with all the other AWS systems like IAM for security.

I hope this was useful to you, and thank you for watching.