Is It a Best/Recommended Practice to Use AWS VPC Peering Connections?

Problem scenario
You have heard about AWS VPC Peering Connections. Should you use them?

Solution
The short answer is “yes.”

Some “best practices” for VPCs are merely step-by-step directions for setting it up while describing options that you may or may not want to take. This posting, on a technical blog of a large reputable company,

A Day That Will Live in Infamy!

FDR proclaimed that December 7th would be a day that would live in infamy. Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941. 80 years later to the day AWS had a major outage (for the us-east-1 region): https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/7/22822332/amazon-server-aws-down-disney-plus-ring-outage

It is an interesting coincidence.

Many people think that the us-east-1 region is the least reliable of Amazon’s regional offerings. Amazon said their “Support Contact Center also relies on the internal AWS network,

Is There a Difference between an IAM Role and an IAM Access Key?

Question
Is there a difference between an IAM role and an IAM access key?

Answer
Yes. To summarize this article, IAM users are for humans and IAM roles are for AWS components (such as S3 buckets and EC-2 instances). As a less significant difference, you do not rotate IAM roles (according to this medium.com post).

What Does MSK Stand For in I.T./DevOps?

Question
You have seen “MSK” in an article on the public cloud. Does the “K” stand for “Key”? What does MSK stand for?

Answer
MSK stands for “Managed Streaming for Kafka”. It is an Amazon product.

“Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) is a fully managed service that enables you to build and run applications that use Apache Kafka to process streaming data.

What Is The Difference between a VPC and a Subnet?

Question
You have heard about VPCs and subnets. What are the differences between these two?

Answer
A subnet is a subdivision of a network. Internal to an enterprise network, you may divide the network into different addresses with gateways, routers, bridges and subnet masks. The subnet mask (in CIDR (classless inter-domain routing) notation may be /28, /24, /10 etc.

A VPC ordinarily has its own NACLs and firewalls associated with it;

How Do You Use an Amazon API Gateway?

Problem scenario
You want to use the AWS PaaS offering for exposing an API and having it be able to scale and handle lots of users easily. How do you use Amazon API Gateway?

Solution
Overview: This is a proof-of-concept. You could use different API types (e.g., web socket APIs for persistent applications like a chat window).

Prerequisite
This assumes you have a working Lambda function configured and you know its name.

How Do You Troubleshoot the Terraform Error ‘unsupported argument aws_key_pair’?

Problem scenario
You run a terraform command. You get ‘unsupported argument aws_key_pair’. You want terraform to create an EC-2 server with a specific key pair. What should you do?

Solution
Don’t use “aws_key_pair”, use “key_name”. The aws_instance section in a .tf file uses a different keyword. (The aws_key_pair is for creating an key-pair in AWS.) Use the “key_name” field for aws_instances like this:

resource “aws_instance” “example” {
ami = “ami-01a1234abcd567”
instance_type = “t2.micro”
key_name = “appleorange”
} …

How Do You Launch the Amazon Workspaces Client from Your Debian Server?

Problem scenario
You have installed the Amazon Workspaces Client on your Ubuntu or Linux Mint server. You want to start the application from the GUI desktop. What do you do?

Possible solution #1
Run this command: sudo find / -name workspacesclient*

Possible solution #2
Try running this from the terminal:
/opt/workspacesclient/workspacesclient

How Do You Go to an ELB from Your Workstation?

Problem scenario
You can go to an ELB’s FQDN via an EC-2 instance (with a curl command). But you cannot go to an ELB from your workstation (with a web browser). What should you do?

Possible solution #1
From the EC-2 instance, can you use nslookup FQDNofELB (where FQDNofELB is the FQDN of the ELB)? This should provide you with the IP address (the last of the IP addresses in the results).