The ramblings of a computer geek
The below gives a simple example showing how you can deploy a containerised workload: a NGINX web server in this example which has two (or more) containers (tasks) running on AWS Fargate, presented behind a “Service” definition which is then presented to the Internet via an Application Load Balancer (ALB) where a certificate is obtained … Read more
The Amazon Container Registry (ECR) allows you to store the images within the cloud, for the purposes of this example we’ll use a simple container using a Dockerfile that creates an Apache web server that says “Hello World!”. Repository The example Terraform definitions can be found within Gitlab: Step 1 – Deploy Terraform You first need … Read more
When using Route53 for DNS, you have the option of using a special AWS only type of record for the Apex or Root record of the domain (zone). Taking an example domain.com, you typically would have a website which has an A record called www.domain.com. But what if you want to have the apex of the domain … Read more
Its recommended to manage your EC2 instances via SSM if/when you need console access rather than using SSH which can pose a security risk. Of course if you need to get or put files into the EC2 instance this can be a bit tricky, however if you have an S3 bucket available you can use … Read more
BASH Prompt via SSM by Default To set the BASH as the default prompt when using SSM, within the AWS Console browse to: Then add the following: Then attempt to login via SSM, you should now find you are getting the BASH prompt. Fancy Colours Edit the .bashrc file within the user home directory and set as … Read more
To get a list of current AWS Aurora MySQL (compatible) Database Engines you can use the following command from the AWS CLI: So you’ll get an output like: At the time of writing (05/02/25) the recommended/default version is: 8.0.mysql_aurora.3.05.2, but remember that the list of Database Engines that are provided will include ones that are … Read more
You can use EC2 Instance Session Manager to give you direct console access without the need for an SSH connection direct to the instance (which can cause some security issues), instead you can get the same kind of access via the AWS CLI. These instructions assume you have an EC2 instance already setup and working … Read more
Elastic IP Addresses (EIP) are great as they provide you with a static IP address which you can use for an endpoint to your application, but when you are automating things with Terraform, you don’t want it to be continually re-created or that IP address will change, and if you have DNS records pointing at … Read more
The AWS Transit Gateway can be used to join the networking of many VPCs (in the same or different AWS Accounts) within the same region together to facilitate communication, it may also be used in conjunction with DX (Direct Connect) or Site-to-Site VPNs to provide connectivity to other Cloud Platforms but additionally to on-premise networks … Read more
DNS name resolution is essential to modern connectivity. The ability for hosts to be able to quickly and reliably resolve DNS domain names (e.g. www.google.com) to their IP address equivalents (e.g. 216.58.204.68 or 2a00:1450:4009:827::2004) to connect and consume services ensures consistent and performant network flows. Due to the essential nature of DNS, DNSSEC is an addition … Read more