Foggy Software

Origin post from CloudHealth Engineering blog. AWS offers a variety of storage options that fit different usage patterns, retention needs and cost profiles. When making an architectural choice of storage in the cloud, today you have a multitude of options to achieve your technical goals. For example, you can use RDS, or stand up your own database using EC2 and EBS. While the two options provide an almost identical service, they differ in the flexibility and cost profiles - with the right one for you dependent on your specific use case. Below is a summary of the different categories of storage options available from AWS, and a short summary of the price drivers behind them: Functional storage: This category includes storage exposed as a functional component. These are databases, traditional or modern. While these services store data, they main pricing driver is the speed of access  - the faster the required access, the higher the price. In this category you’ll find: R...

Or,  How to retain fiscal sanity and control over cloud usage The humdrum of Lean, Agility, Cloud and Devops converging has been in the air for a while now. Sometimes it feels like teenagers on prom night discussing their upcoming exploits - many talk about it, some fumble around experimenting, and few are actually doing anything with it. $ per hour... The affinity between the movements is evident - minimize upfront investment until value is proven, while ensuring you can grown your investment and capacity as this occurs. Lean applies it to the business model, Agile to the development process and the combination of DevOps powered by "resources at the point of the mouse" of the public cloud bring it to resource provisioning. The mixture of DevOps and public cloud produce this mixture that allows companies such as AirBnB to prove their business and scale it up. There's one big fly in this otherwise delicious soup - the bean counters. They want to be able to exer...

Or, Letting Power users change their password   This is a short post, venting some frustration with a silly AWS default, with the hopes of sparing someone else the joys.   Best security practices call for frequently changing your passwords, that's just common sense. AWS Identity and Access Management goes to the extent of providing some really cool tools to ensure that happens. IAM Roles  provide a mechanism to allow software running on designated EC2 instances to retrieve "frequently" rotated access credentials. Seems like a well thought out solution to a common problem - how to let your software in EC2 securely access AWS resources, without embedding credentials in your AMI or code.   That said, allowing users to change their console password, even users whose policy is Power User. True, you should probably not really use the console... there's an API, but the default Power User template prevents all and any IAM calls, with this policy statement: Reading...