Cheaper and Faster REST APIs? Newsletter Every week, we write about all things AWS. For example, we unbox or review new AWS services. We also share pitfalls that we learned about the hard way ourselves. On top of that, we provide code examples for Infrastructure as Code and Serverless applications. Subscribe to our newsletter for free! Notes Don't miss our blog post Review: API Gateway HTTP APIs - Cheaper and Faster REST APIs?, the written version of this podcast episode. HTTP APIs An API gateway acts as an API front-end that receives API requests from clients and forwards them to back-end services. Typically, an API gateway offers the following features: Throttling Billing Authentication and authorization Request validation Request and response transformation AWS offers different types of API gateways as a managed service. This review takes a closer look at the new service API Gateway HTTP APIs announced in December 2019 and generally since available in March 2020. The cloud provider promises that HTTP APIs are faster and cheaper than it's predecessor. We will look at hard technical facts instead of flowery marketing promises. A summary of Amazon's API gateways to avoid confusion: API Gateway REST APIs is the full-feature flagship service to build REST APIs announced in 2015. API Gateway HTTP APIs is the fast and straightforward alternative to build REST APIs announced in 2019. API Gateway WebSocket APIs was announced in 2018 and allows you to build a real-time API using WebSockets. Application Load Balancer (ALB) is a layer-7 load balancer with similarities with an API gateway. This review focuses on HTTP APIs. Further AWS reviews Looking for more reviews of AWS services? Here you go! Review: AWS Backup - A centralized place for managing backups? Review: Amazon Aurora Serverless - A cloud-native and production-ready relational database? Review: AWS Global Accelerator - Improving Latency and Design for Failure [Review: Amazon Connect – A Programmable Telephone System](https://cloudonaut.io/review-amazon-connect-programmable-telephone-system/] marbot available for Microsoft Teams We are happy to announce, that marbot, our chatbot monitoring your AWS infrastructure is now available not only for Slack but for Microsoft Teams as well. marbot sets up CloudWatch Alarms and EventBridge Rules for all parts of your AWS infrastructure. CloudFormation and Terraform are supported. Your team receives alerts as direct messages or channel messages via Slack or Microsoft Teams. The alert includes relevant details to understand and solve the problem. Give marbot for Micrsoft Teams a try! Support us We launched cloudonaut.io in 2015. Since then, we have published hundreds of articles, podcast episodes, and videos. It's all free and means a lot of work in our spare time. We enjoy sharing our AWS knowledge with you. Have you learned something new by reading, listening, or watching our content? If so, we kindly ask you to support us in producing high-quality & independent AWS content. We look forward to sharing our AWS knowledge with you. Support us! Feedback We ask for feedback! Please rate or review our podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Or send us a message via Twitter (Andreas and Michael) or LinkedIn (Andreas and Michael) or send us an email.

Newsletter Every week, we write about all things AWS. For example, we unbox or review new AWS services. We also share pitfalls that we learned about the hard way ourselves. On top of that, we provide code examples for Infrastructure as Code and Serverless applications. Subscribe to our newsletter for free! Notes Don't miss our blog post End-user monitoring of your website with CloudWatch Synthetics, the written version of this podcast episode. CloudFormation template mentioned: https://github.com/marbot-io/monitoring-jump-start/blob/master/marbot-synthetics-website.yml Support us We launched cloudonaut.io in 2015. Since then, we have published hundreds of articles, podcast episodes, and videos. It's all free and means a lot of work in our spare time. We enjoy sharing our AWS knowledge with you. Have you learned something new by reading, listening, or watching our content? If so, we kindly ask you to support us in producing high-quality & independent AWS content. We look forward to sharing our AWS knowledge with you. Support us! Feedback We ask for feedback! Please rate or review our podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Or send us a message via Twitter (Andreas and Michael) or LinkedIn (Andreas and Michael) or send us an email.

Comparing different approaches to manage a container cluster on top of EC2 Newsletter Every week, we write about all things AWS. For example, we unbox or review new AWS services. We also share pitfalls that we learned about the hard way ourselves. On top of that, we provide code examples for Infrastructure as Code and Serverless applications. Subscribe to our newsletter for free! Notes Don't miss our blog post Scaling Container Clusters on AWS: ECS and EKS, the written version of this podcast episode. ECS with Cluster Auto Scaling ECS task lifecycle, new state PROVISIONING for clusters with capacity provider. Check out Deep Dive on Amazon ECS Cluster Auto Scaling when interested in more details. ECS with DIY Auto Scaling Scale out with CloudWatch event SERVICE_TASK_PLACEMENT_FAILURE. Scale in based on CloudWatch metrics CPUReservation and MemoryReservation. Auto Scaling Lifecycle Hooks Container Instance Draining Check out our open source project widdix/aws-cf-templates including an implementation of the discussed DIY Auto Scaling for ECS clusters. EKS with Cluster Autoscaler EKS Managed Node Groups K8s Cluster Autoscaler Specifying a Disruption Budget for your Application Rapid Docker on AWS Become a Docker on AWS professional! Our ebook/video course Rapid Docker on AWS is designed for DevOps engineers and web developers who want to run dockerized web applications on AWS. We lead you with many examples: From dockerizing your application to Continuous Deployment and Infrastructure as Code on AWS. No prior knowledge of Docker and AWS is required. Learn more! Support us We launched cloudonaut.io in 2015. Since then, we have published hundreds of articles, podcast episodes, and videos. It's all free and means a lot of work in our spare time. We enjoy sharing our AWS knowledge with you. Have you learned something new by reading, listening, or watching our content? If so, we kindly ask you to support us in producing high-quality & independent AWS content. We look forward to sharing our AWS knowledge with you. Support us! Feedback We ask for feedback! Please rate or review our podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Or send us a message via Twitter (Andreas and Michael) or LinkedIn (Andreas and Michael) or send us an email.

Newsletter Every week, we write about all things AWS. For example, we unbox or review new AWS services. We also share pitfalls that we learned about the hard way ourselves. On top of that, we provide code examples for Infrastructure as Code and Serverless applications. Subscribe to our newsletter for free! Notes Don't miss our updated blog post CloudFormation vs. Terraform, the written version of this podcast episode.* Our open-source CloudFormation template projects: aws-cf-templates cfn-modules Our open-source Terraform modules can be found in the Terraform Registry List of missing CloudFormation coverage. Support us We launched cloudonaut.io in 2015. Since then, we have published hundreds of articles, podcast episodes, and videos. It's all free and means a lot of work in our spare time. We enjoy sharing our AWS knowledge with you. Have you learned something new by reading, listening, or watching our content? If so, we kindly ask you to support us in producing high-quality & independent AWS content. We look forward to sharing our AWS knowledge with you. Support us! Feedback We ask for feedback! Please rate or review our podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Or send us a message via Twitter (Andreas and Michael) or LinkedIn (Andreas and Michael) or send us an email.

Think twice before using AWS Organizations Newsletter Every week, we write about all things AWS. For example, we unbox or review new AWS services. We also share pitfalls that we learned about the hard way ourselves. On top of that, we provide code examples for Infrastructure as Code and Serverless applications. Subscribe to our newsletter for free! Notes Don't miss our blog post AWS Account Structure: Think twice before using AWS Organizations, the written version of this podcast episode. Book tipp: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Check out bucketAV: Scan your S3 buckets for viruses, worms, and trojans. bucketAV detects malware in real-time or on-demand.. Support us We launched cloudonaut.io in 2015. Since then, we have published hundreds of articles, podcast episodes, and videos. It's all free and means a lot of work in our spare time. We enjoy sharing our AWS knowledge with you. Have you learned something new by reading, listening, or watching our content? If so, we kindly ask you to support us in producing high-quality & independent AWS content. We look forward to sharing our AWS knowledge with you. Support us! Feedback We ask for feedback! Please rate or review our podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Or send us a message via Twitter (Andreas and Michael) or LinkedIn (Andreas and Michael) or send us an email.

Refresh your CloudWatch knowledge! Newsletter Every week, we write about all things AWS. For example, we unbox or review new AWS services. We also share pitfalls that we learned about the hard way ourselves. On top of that, we provide code examples for Infrastructure as Code and Serverless applications. Subscribe to our newsletter for free! Notes Don't miss our blog post CloudWatch Metrics & Alarms reloaded, the written version of this podcast episode. Metric Math use cases from our blog: Monitoring EC2 Network Utilization Combine CloudWatch metrics for Auto Scaling or to reduce costs Alarm use case from our blog: Dead man's switch with CloudWatch marbot takes care of your Amazon Web Services (AWS) monitoring setup. You receive and close all relevant alerts via Slack. marbot integrates with CloudWatch, Elastic Beanstalk, EC2, RDS, any many more. Check marbot out for free! Support us We launched cloudonaut.io in 2015. Since then, we have published hundreds of articles, podcast episodes, and videos. It's all free and means a lot of work in our spare time. We enjoy sharing our AWS knowledge with you. Have you learned something new by reading, listening, or watching our content? If so, we kindly ask you to support us in producing high-quality & independent AWS content. We look forward to sharing our AWS knowledge with you. Support us! Feedback We ask for feedback! Please rate or review our podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Or send us a message via Twitter (Andreas and Michael) or LinkedIn (Andreas and Michael) or send us an email.

Pitfalls That You Should Avoid When Designing A Network Architecture Newsletter Every week, we write about all things AWS. For example, we unbox or review new AWS services. We also share pitfalls that we learned about the hard way ourselves. On top of that, we provide code examples for Infrastructure as Code and Serverless applications. Subscribe to our newsletter for free! Notes Don't miss our blog post Advanced AWS Networking: Pitfalls That You Should Avoid, the written version of this podcast episode. AWS offers shiny and powerful networking services. However, you should know about the pitfalls when designing advanced networking architectures for AWS. I will share some pitfalls that came to my attention when consulting clients to get the most out of AWS. You will learn how to answer the following questions: VPC Peering or Transit Gateway? A Transit Gateway simplifies peering VPCs. However, there is a baseline costs of $36.00 per month for each VPC attached to the Transit Gateway. NAT Gateway or Public Subnet? Adding NAT Gateways to your architecture costs $96.00 per month for 3 availability zones. Also, the costs for outbound network traffic will increase by 50%. From a economical point of view it makes sense to place workloads with high outgoing network throughput into public subnets. VPC Endpoints or NAT Gateway? Always add VPC Endpoints for S3 and DynamoDB. But do the math, when adding VPC Endpoints for other AWS services to your network. Using a NAT Gateway might be cheaper. CloudFront or Akamai, Cloudflare, Fastly …? When choosing a CDN provider besides CloudFront, make sure you have taken into account the additional costs for outbound traffic. Route 53 Resolver or Public Hosted Zone? Share Route 53 Outbound Resolvers between VPCs and AWS accounts to reduce costs. Think about using Public Hosted Zones instead of paying $180.00 per month for an Route 53 Inbound Resolver. Amazon Web Services in Action a comprehensive introduction to computing, storing, and networking in the AWS cloud. You'll find clear, relevant coverage of all the essential AWS services you to know, emphasizing best practices for security, high availability and scalability. Buy now!! Support us We launched cloudonaut.io in 2015. Since then, we have published hundreds of articles, podcast episodes, and videos. It's all free and means a lot of work in our spare time. We enjoy sharing our AWS knowledge with you. Have you learned something new by reading, listening, or watching our content? If so, we kindly ask you to support us in producing high-quality & independent AWS content. We look forward to sharing our AWS knowledge with you. Support us! Feedback We ask for feedback! Please rate or review our podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Or send us a message via Twitter (Andreas and Michael) or LinkedIn (Andreas and Michael) or send us an email.

EC2, Fargate, or Serverless? Newsletter Every week, we write about all things AWS. For example, we unbox or review new AWS services. We also share pitfalls that we learned about the hard way ourselves. On top of that, we provide code examples for Infrastructure as Code and Serverless applications. Subscribe to our newsletter for free! Notes Don't miss our blog post What''s the best AWS Compute option for your project?, the written version of this podcast episode. There are many good reasons why you should move to the cloud and AWS in particular. Benefit from the latest innovations or consume sophisticated technology as a commodity (relational databases, Hadoop clusters, data warehouses, …) to lower your time to market. You can automate every single task to increase the quality of your operations. Pay as you go by default for maximum freedom with options for longer-term commitments for lower prices. An elastic world allows new services and processes that will transform the way you think IT. Last but not least, you get the same capabilities across the globe. The only downside: AWS offers so many choices and freedom! Support us We launched cloudonaut.io in 2015. Since then, we have published hundreds of articles, podcast episodes, and videos. It's all free and means a lot of work in our spare time. We enjoy sharing our AWS knowledge with you. Have you learned something new by reading, listening, or watching our content? If so, we kindly ask you to support us in producing high-quality & independent AWS content. We look forward to sharing our AWS knowledge with you. Support us! Feedback We ask for feedback! Please rate or review our podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Or send us a message via Twitter (Andreas and Michael) or LinkedIn (Andreas and Michael) or send us an email.

Amazon Connect – A Programmable Telephone System Newsletter Every week, we write about all things AWS. For example, we unbox or review new AWS services. We also share pitfalls that we learned about the hard way ourselves. On top of that, we provide code examples for Infrastructure as Code and Serverless applications. Subscribe to our newsletter for free! Notes Don't miss our blog post Review: Amazon Connect – A Programmable Telephone System, the written version of this podcast episode. Do you provide services to consumer or business clients? Which channels do you provide for clients to get support, leave feedback, or let off frustration? Amazon Connect provides a contact center solution in the cloud. Your clients contact you via phone or chat. A group of agents answers their phone calls and chat conversations. The workflows are fully customizable to your specific needs. This review puts Amazon Connect to the test. I set up Amazon Connect for our consulting agency widdix, recently. While doing so, I had a look into the technical details as well. Support us We launched cloudonaut.io in 2015. Since then, we have published hundreds of articles, podcast episodes, and videos. It's all free and means a lot of work in our spare time. We enjoy sharing our AWS knowledge with you. Have you learned something new by reading, listening, or watching our content? If so, we kindly ask you to support us in producing high-quality & independent AWS content. We look forward to sharing our AWS knowledge with you. Support us! Feedback We ask for feedback! Please rate or review our podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Or send us a message via Twitter (Andreas and Michael) or LinkedIn (Andreas and Michael) or send us an email.

Best practices to manage mutable EC2 instances Newsletter Every week, we write about all things AWS. For example, we unbox or review new AWS services. We also share pitfalls that we learned about the hard way ourselves. On top of that, we provide code examples for Infrastructure as Code and Serverless applications. Subscribe to our newsletter for free! Notes Don't miss our blog post EC2 Instances 2.0 - Time to Update Your Toolbox, the written version of this podcast episode. Managing a mutable EC2 instance comes with many responsibilities. In this episode, Michael shows you how to solve everyday challenges by leveraging the latest and greatest capabilities of the AWS platform. Find a full implementation codified into two CloudFormation templates (al2-mutable-public.yaml and al2-mutable-private.yaml) on Github: https://github.com/widdix/aws-cf-templates/tree/master/ec2 Amazon Web Services in Action, Second Edition is a comprehensive introduction to computing, storing, and networking in the AWS cloud. You'll find clear, relevant coverage of all the essential AWS services you to know, emphasizing best practices for security, high availability and scalability. Get a copy now! Support us We launched cloudonaut.io in 2015. Since then, we have published hundreds of articles, podcast episodes, and videos. It's all free and means a lot of work in our spare time. We enjoy sharing our AWS knowledge with you. Have you learned something new by reading, listening, or watching our content? If so, we kindly ask you to support us in producing high-quality & independent AWS content. We look forward to sharing our AWS knowledge with you. Support us! Feedback We ask for feedback! Please rate or review our podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Or send us a message via Twitter (Andreas and Michael) or LinkedIn (Andreas and Michael) or send us an email.