Skip to main content

AWS Architecting


Let's not talk about how many times I had to respell Architecting.

Most Secure, High performing, resilient,  efficient

Consistent for evaluating architectures.

Quicker Build and Deploy.
Stop guessing, start automating.

Lower or Mitigate Risks
- What are they?
- Do something about it.





Informed Decisions
- Cause and Effect.
- Not Affect.

Best Practices
- Exist.

Check ‘em out at aws.amazon.com/architecture/well-architected

———————

The Five Gates of Heaven Pillars of Well Architected Framework.

Operational Excellence
- Monitor things, deliver better value.
- Operations as code (scripting, automation)
- Automate documentation (Wow then why are humans here again?)
- Tiny changes for tiny reversals if needed.
- Refine processes
- You will fail. It’s okay. But you can mitigate or remove where you might fail.
- Most important is that you learn from it.


Security
Protect Systems, information, and assets.

- Strong identity foundation
    - Least privilege
    - Seperation of duties.
    - authorize sections of your AWS resources properly
- Traceability
    - audit, audit, audit.
    - And logs.
    - And metrics.

- In-depth security layering, not just the outer wall, so to speak.
- Automate security (lot of automation)

- Is your data encrypted at move and at rest? It should be. Also, don’t let people touch it. No one should be editing it at the home base.
- Run incident response sims.


Reliability
Is it up? And if it’s down, how long will it take to be up again? What happened to data in the process?

- Test in the cloud to validate recovery procedures.
- Monitor KPIs to trigger automation and auto notification about failures and to kick in auto recovery processes.
- Horizontal scaling.
- Out of many, One. But instead, Kill one to make many for better redundancy.
- Don’t guess capacity. Monitor the demand and system resources used.
- Let automation change your infrastructure.


Performance Efficiency

- Deployment. Mass Deployment.
- Take programming (I THINK it’s programming, it mentions NoSQL and Databases) into services.
- Go serverless (Though we know there re still servers)
- Have fun and experiment in a non-work enviroment of course.


Cost Optimization
- Pay as you go, so use as much or as little as you can afford.
- Test it out first. Analyze what you need.
- Stop them when you’re not using them.
- Measure efficiency.
- Don’t pay for data centers

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Connecting IoT Devices to a Registration Server (Packet Tracer, Cisco)

In Packet Tracer, a demo software made by Cisco Systems. It certainly has changed a lot since 2016. It's almost an Olympic feat to even get started with it now, but it does look snazzy. This is for the new CCNA, that integrates, among other things, IoT and Automation, which I've worked on here before. Instructions here . I don't know if this is an aspect of "Let's make sure people are paying attention and not simply following blindly", or an oversight - The instructions indicate a Meraki Server, when a regular one is the working option here. I have to enable the IoT service on this server. Also, we assign the server an IPv4 address from a DHCP pool instead of giving it a static one. For something that handles our IoT business, perhaps that's safer; Getting a new IPv4 address every week or so is a minimal step against an intruder, but it is a step. There are no devices associated with this new server; In an earlier lab (not shown), I attached them to 'H

Securing Terraform and You Part 1 -- rego, Tfsec, and Terrascan

9/20: The open source version of Terraform is now  OpenTofu     Sometimes, I write articles even when things don't work. It's about showing a learning process.  Using IaC means consistency, and one thing you don't want to do is have 5 open S3 buckets on AWS that anyone on the internet can reach.  That's where tools such as Terrascan and Tfsec come in, where we can make our own policies and rules to be checked against our code before we init.  As this was contract work, I can't show you the exact code used, but I can tell you that this blog post by Cesar Rodriguez of Cloud Security Musings was quite helpful, as well as this one by Chris Ayers . The issue is using Rego; I found a cool VS Code Extension; Terrascan Rego Editor , as well as several courses on Styra Academy; Policy Authoring and Policy Essentials . The big issue was figuring out how to tell Terrascan to follow a certain policy; I made it, put it in a directory, and ran the program while in that directory

Building, Breaking, and Building A CRM with Retool

 I like no- or low-code solutions to things. I've often wanted to simply push a button or move some GUI around and have the code implement itself.  I've thought about building something that's like a customer relationship management (CRM) system for keeping up with my network better than my little spreadsheet where I click links and then go like something. The general idea in this CRM Development is:  To have a GUI to add people to a NRM (Network Relationship Management).       Attach it to a database (MySQL is what I went with eventually using Amazon Relational Database service, but you can use PostGRES, and probably others).     Make sure components are connected to each other in the retool interface. This video is a good start. Watching the tutorial video, heard some SQL commands and went 'Oh no 😳" before going "Wait I know basic SQL", which is good, because you'll see.  When you get set up, there's a plethora of resources you can use -- Incl