AWS Global Ambassador Summit, Seattle

I’m honored to have recently returned to the country after attending the AWS Global Ambassador Summit at AWS headquarters in Seattle, USA, for the second consecutive year. This 3-day event brought together Ambassadors from around the globe, alongside leaders from within the AWS organization.

Day 1

We learned from AWS about the advancements in Amazon Q Developer and its future trajectory, explored Quantum Computing with Amazon Braket, and gained insights into how AWS leverages social media to monitor and amplify their brand. We also delved into the culture of innovation and received the latest updates on Amazon GuardDuty. A highlight for me, as always, was hearing from our peers during the Ambassador Lightning Talks, which is one of my favorite parts of the event.

Configuring the Cloud Intelligence Dashboards

The Cloud Intelligence Dashboards are an open-source framework that provides customers with actionable insights and optimisation opportunities at scale within an organisation. These dashboards help organisations drive financial accountability, whilst helping them to optimise cost, track usage goals, and implement best-practices for governance.

The dashboards provided by this Solution have come from the GitHub Repository and provide a variety of Amazon QuickSight Dashboards to provide visibility over the spend in there AWS Accounts.

Tagging Strategies for AWS

What are tags & why do we need them?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) allows you to assign metadata to many of your AWS resources in the form of tags. Each tag is a simple label consisting of a key and an optional value to store information about the resource or data retained on that resource. Implementing a consistent tagging strategy can make it easier to filter and search for resources, monitor cost and usage, as well as manage your AWS environment.

Preparing for AWS re:Invent 2023

AWS re:Invent 2023, the biggest event in the annual Amazon Web Services (AWS) calendar, is just around the corner.

If you’ll be attending in person, it can be difficult to know which sessions will be valuable. In this blog post I’ve listed the sessions that I’m planning on attending as well as a few tips to get the best from the event.

Reserved seating for the event opens on 17th October that I like to call whack-a-mole night as no sooner have you tried to reserve a seat it’s quite likely that session will already be fully booked and then you’ll end up queuing up on the day and potentially mission out on other opportunities available to you at the event.

Configuring Amazon VPC IP Address Manager (IPAM)

In many enterprise environments a common challenge is to how to handle the allocation of IP CIDR blocks be that to Data Centers, Offices, Subnets so as to ensure that resources don’t end up with IP addresses that have already been assigned to resources on the Network. Duplicate IP Addresses on the Network can cause numerous issues and AWS have previously written the following blog that discusses several solutions to this challenge such as the use of NAT Gateways and AWS PrivateLink or a couple of more manual approaches to workaround the issue.

Field Notes: Using Amazon VPC Prefixes with Security Groups

Recently during a Customer engagement I encountered what seemed to be a fairly straightforward issues with a Security Group that was running into a service quota isssue with the number of Inbound or outbound rules per security group.

Background to the Issue

To give a little bit of context, this particulary security group was associated with a couple of Amazon EC2 Instances that were running Microsoft Windows Server 2019 and performing the function of Active Directory Domain Controllers that were being self-managed by the Customer.

Customising AWS Control Tower with Account Factory Customisations

At AWS re:Invent this year Account Factory Customisations was released. This post will walk you through how to configure and use the new functionality as in my opinion the documentation isn’t particularly clear as to how things work and there were also issues with the implementation steps when I first implemented it.

Use Case

For my specific situation that I’m utilising this for I want to deploy a VPC that leverages the Amazon VPC IP Address Manager (IPAM) for obtaining an IP CIDR Range since I don’t want to have to manually enter one each time and run the risk of overlapping address space. As part of my pre-requisties I’ve already written some automation using CloudFormation to not only setup VPC IPAM for delegated administration in my Organization, but I’ve also set up VPC IPAM so that I have seperate IPAM Pools for different regions and also different environments within those regions. This post won’t go into the details of the automation or the details of the CloudFormation Template that I’ll deploy either but how the Solution ultimately works.