Introduction In this blog post, we will illustrate how to automate the configuration necessary to manage migrated servers with improved security and reduced costs. To administer servers in an on-premises environment, administrators often use secure shell (SSH) or Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) to connect. After migrating to Amazon Web Services (AWS), this may not be feasible due to changes in network connectivity or security policies. The traditional solution to this involves deploying one or more bastion hosts (also called “jump servers”) to access and manage the servers. While this method wor ..read more

Introduction Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics canaries are scripts that monitor your endpoints and APIs by simulating the actions of a user. These canaries run on a schedule, check the availability and latency of your applications, and alert you when there are issues. Canary scripts are written in Node.js and Python, and they run inside an AWS Lambda function. The development process for canaries closely mirrors that of applications, involving tasks like coding, testing, debugging and deployment. However, unlike traditional application development, there is no local testing and debugging environme ..read more

AWS CloudTrail tracks user and API activities across your AWS environments for governance and auditing purposes. Large enterprises typically use multiple AWS accounts, and many of those accounts might need access to a data lake managed by a single AWS account. By using Lake Formation integration with CloudTrail Lake, you can securely aggregate the data across multiple AWS accounts and centralize it within a single account using event data store for auditing purposes. More information about cross-account data sharing in Lake Formation is available in this public documentation. Amazon QuickSight ..read more

AWS announced Amazon CloudWatch Application Signals during re:Invent 2023. It is a new feature to monitor and understand the health of Java applications. Today we are excited to announce that Application Signals now supports Python applications. Enabling Application Signals allows you to use AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT) to instrument Python applications without code changes. This lets you collect key metrics and traces for libraries and frameworks developed using Python. This allows you to quickly triage operational health and monitor performance goals, without writing custom code or cr ..read more

Introduction In this blog post, we will walk you through the step-by-step process of completing VMware virtual machine (VM) migrations to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) using the (Application Migration Service). Moreover, we will show how to apply a custom post-launch action script to remove proprietary VMware tools from the migrated VMs. Migrating on-premises VMware workloads to Amazon EC2 can provide significant benefits including increased scalability, improved performance, and reduced operational costs. The Application Migration Service simplifies this process by providing a sea ..read more

First introduced in the mid-20th century, mainframe systems continue to be the backbone of many enterprises relying on these systems for mission-critical applications. In fact, it is estimated that at least 71% of Fortune 500 companies use mainframe systems. Globally, 90% of credit card transactions happen on mainframe systems. According to IBM, USD 7.7 trillion in annual credit card payments, 29 billion annual ATM transactions, and 12.6 billion transactions per day at 92 of the world’s top 100 banks rely on mainframes to host their core systems. Due to the acceleration of digital transformati ..read more

This blog post was co-written by Brent Eager, Senior Software Engineer, StormForge StormForge is the creator of Optimize Live, a Kubernetes vertical rightsizing solution that is compatible with the Kubernetes HorizontalPodAutoscaler (HPA). Using cluster-based agents, machine learning, and Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, Optimize Live is able to continuously calculate and apply optimal resource requests, limits, and HPA target utilization across thousands of workloads. In this blog post, we’ll discuss how using Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus allows StormForge to focus on their cor ..read more

AWS customers realize more than a 5:1 ratio of benefits to investment costs over five years with breakeven on their investment occurring in an average of 10 months (source: “The Business Value of Amazon Web Services”, an IDC whitepaper). This blog aims to help Information Technology (IT) teams calculate this value using the tools needed to build a data driven business case for moving from on-premises to AWS. When companies compare the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of running workloads on-premises to running them on AWS, they primarily focus on infrastructure costs. While infrastructure cost re ..read more

Today, applications are more distributed than ever before and they no longer run in isolation. This is especially the case when utilizing  Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) or Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). A distributed workload or system is one that encompasses multiple small independent components, all working together to complete a task or job. This helps to ensure that even if one system or component fails, that the availability of the service will not be affected. Distributed Tracing is a method of observing client-side requests as they propaga ..read more

It is important for cloud security operations teams to maintain a high level of cloud security and detect and respond to malicious web activity in near real-time. AWS WAF helps protect web applications from common web exploits that could affect application availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources. However, as your cloud environment scales with your business needs, analysis and monitoring of the logs across multiple AWS Accounts and Regions can become a challenge in the absence of a centralized visualization platform. In this blog post, you will learn how to configure l ..read more