AWS Man

If you’ve been to any cloud conference, browsed around ‘cloud twitter’ a bit or are in the process of starting your cloud journey, it’s a sure guarantee you’ve heard about serverless by now. Is it just a buzzword, or is serverless something you can really start to get your hands dirty with and benefit from?  Accessing compute power became much easier when “the cloud” entered the market. Now, rather than waiting for bare metal servers to arrive, installing them into racks, and cabling during installation, you can set up your servers with only a few clicks on the web console. Yet although provisioning today’s servers takes only minutes, you still need to prepare and maintain them by patching, installing necessary packages, and setting up environment variables. This takes time. So how do you remove this overhead? You go  serverless! In the first article of this three-part series, we discuss the serverless basics: what it is, where it came from, why you would want to use it a...

EC2 is a wildly popular AWS service and is bound to be one you either have a lot of experience with or will at some point. One of the most basic tasks you can perform in EC2 is provisioning new instances. Deploying EC2 instances is fairly straightforward if using the management console. The management console walks you through all of the dependencies that an EC2 instance requires. However, all of those dependencies are up to you to set up and define yourself if you’re setting up some automation script. In that case, you need to become familiar with not only setting up the EC2 instance itself but also all of the other resources that an EC2 instance depends on like a VPC, optional internet gateway, a route table, route, AMI image, route table, and a few more. By understanding now just how to deploy an EC2 instance but also understanding everything else required will allow you to create a much smarter automation script. In this article, we’re going to cover how to provision many co...

Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) last week announced the first Windows Server 2019 machine images (AMIs) for Windows Server 2019. The latest edition of Microsoft's flagship back-end server OS  debuted  last October, shortly after which users started  asking  about corresponding AMIs with queries such as: "I am wondering if there is an ETA for a Windows Server 2019 AMI by Amazon?" There was no definitive answer to those questions until a Jan. 7  post  announcing the arrival. "Windows Server 2019 comes loaded with a variety of new features including smaller and more efficient Windows containers, support for Linux containers for application modernization and App Compatibility Feature on Demand," the post said. The AMIs run on the platform's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service and available EC2 instances include: Windows Server 2019 Windows Server 2019 with Hyper-V Windows Server 2019 with Containers Windows Server 2019 with Select Language Packs W...

Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched several enhancements to SageMaker, its machine learning platform, at this week's re:Invent conference. The company announced the general availability of  SageMaker Ground Truth , a service that promises to reduce the manual labor and costs associated with labeling data in preparation for machine learning training. SageMaker Ground Truth lets users tap "human annotators" (whether they're from a third-party provider, the  Amazon Mechanical Turk  crowdsource service or their own workforce) to do part of the labeling tasks. The service then uses that human-labeled data as a guide to do the rest of the work, greatly reducing the time it takes to finish the dataset and potentially slashing costs by up to 70 percent, according to AWS'  announcement . "Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth can optionally use active learning to automate the labeling of your input data. Active learning is a machine learning technique that identifies da...

One of the biggest advantages in this Automator’s eyes of using Amazon’s S3 service for file storage is its ability to interface directly with the Lambda service. If you’re not familiar with AWS Lambda, it’s essentially code execution in the cloud. There are no servers to manage nor even a terminal window! Lambda is a window that gives you the ability to run code without concerning yourself with anything else. One of the coolest features of Lambda though is its ability to natively integrate with other AWS services. In Lambda, your code is broken down into function. Each function contains not only the code to execute but also what action will trigger that code as well as other execution options. That  how  concept is powerful. Think about it. Running Python, Node.JS, etc. code without having to worry about the infrastructure, but if you’re forced to kick off that code by logging into the AWS management console all the time, it’s not too useful. Lambda allows you to define ...

IT training company Global Knowledge released a report on top-paying IT certifications for 2019, with two AWS certs making the top five. The firm culled data from its annual IT skills and salary report (coming later this year) to compile this year's cloud-heavy list. "This year's highest-paying certifications reveal a strong emphasis on particular topics, such as cloud computing, cybersecurity, networking and project management," the company said in a Monday (Feb 11) blog  post . "In fact, cloud and project management dominate the top five spots." And in those top five spots are two AWS certs with associated reported salaries both more than $130,000: AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate. This demonstrates "expertise in designing and deploying scalable systems on AWS" and is listed with a $132,840annual salary. AWS Certified Developer – Associate. This validates "technical expertise in developing and maintaining applications ...

It's becoming more of a two-horse race in the cloud computing arena, as a new RightScale State of the Cloud report reinforces other studies that show Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) dwarfing competitors in market share, though No. 2 Microsoft Azure is narrowing the gap. "Azure continues to grow quickly and reduce the AWS lead, especially among enterprises," says the " RightScale 2019 State of the Cloud Report ," this year published by Flexera, which acquired RightScale last year but which is continuing the eight-year tradition of publishing the report. "Overall Azure adoption grew from 45 to 52 percent to narrow the gap with AWS," the report said. "As a result, Azure adoption has now reached 85 percent of AWS adoption, up from 70 percent last year." [Click on image for larger view.] Public Cloud Adoption - Enterprise  (source: Flexera). Furthermore, "Azure continues to catch up with AWS overall especially among enterprises, where...

Lambda@Edge Lambda@Edge  is a new Lambda-based processing model that allows you to run functions in response to various  Amazon CloudFront  events—in AWS locations that are closer to the end user. It can modify CloudFront requests and responses and has many practical use cases, including: Creating new HTTP responses that redirect unauthenticated users to login pages. Inspecting cookies in order to rewrite URLs to different versions of websites for testing purposes. Inspecting headers and authorized tokens for access control before deciding whether to forward a request. Adding, deleting, and modifying headers. Rewriting URL paths to redirect users to different locations, depending on need. To use Lambda@Edge, simply write a piece of code (AWS offers  several examples for Lambda@Edge functions) and set up the trigger to be a specific CloudFront event. After the trigger is set, your function will be replicated to multiple AWS edge locations. These locations ...

Cloud skills are paying off in today's tech sector, a new report from careers site Dice says, with Amazon-related skills among the most profitable. In fact, AWS services are strewn throughout the top-paying skills list, even taking two of the top five salary slots. Placing No. 3 on that list is Amazon DynamoDB, followed by Amazon Redshift, both providing more than $125,000 as an average salary. The top five entries on that list are: Go programming language (Golang): $132,827 Kafka: $127,554 Amazon DynamoDB: $125,554 Amazon Redshift: $125,090 Cassandra: $124,152 Overall, Dice's annual tech salary study shows low unemployment and stagnant salaries, with other considerations beyond salary affecting job choices among developers and other pros who seem increasingly willing to move on. That latter point is highlighted by a section of the newly published  Dice 2019 Salary Report  from the tech careers specialist titled "It's Not  Only  About Money." ...