Migration in progress

Currently migrating content from Blogger, please excuse the chaos. Excerpts and pagination should now be (mostly) correct, a few other useability improvements are still in progress.

• 2025-03-02 11:37

  Installing Amazon Workspaces on Ubuntu 24.04 (noble)

  There is currently no Ubuntu 24.04 client for Amazon Workspaces, fortunately the 22.04 client can be installed via apt with only a minor tweak.

• 2025-03-01 09:13

  Retrieving EC2 instance profile credentials with IMDSv2

  Quick example of fetching EC2 instance profile credentials using IMDSv2.

• 2021-08-08 09:44

  Reducing VPC interface endpoint costs in dev/test environments

  Two quick tips for potentially reducing VPC interface endpoint costs.

• 2021-07-01 08:52

  Checking regional service availability with the AWS CLI

  Using System Manager public parameters a quick CLI one liner for checking if an AWS service is available in a region:

• 2019-09-07 11:56

  AWS in the weeds - S3 CloudWatch metrics and lifecycle actions that are in progress

  I was recently working with a customer on an issue that highlighted a poorly explained side effect of the reversibility of lifecycle actions. The purpose of this post is to explain this behaviour with the hope that it will save S3 customers unexpected costs. TLDR: S3 CloudWatch metrics don't accurately display metrics about lifecycle actions that are still in progress.

• 2019-02-16 15:21

  AWS tip: Wildcard characters in S3 lifecycle policy prefixes

  A quick word of warning regarding S3's treatment of asterisks (*) in object lifecycle policies. In S3 asterisks are valid 'special' characters and can be used in object key names, this can lead to a lifecycle action not being applied as expected when the prefix contains an asterisk.

• 2018-10-14 11:14

  Finding S3 API requests from previous versions of the AWS CLI and SDKs

  Earlier this year the S3 team announced that S3 will stop accepting API requests signed using AWS Signature Version 2 after June 24th, 2019. Customers will need to update their SDKs, CLIs, and custom implementations to make use of AWS Signature Version 4 to avoid impact after this date. It might be difficult to find older applications or instances using outdated versions of the AWS CLI or SDKs that need to be updated, the purpose of this post is to explain how AWS CloudTrail data events and Amazon Athena can be used to help identify applications that may need to be updated. We will cover the setup of the CloudTrail data events, the Athena table creation, and some Athena queries to filter and refine the results to help with this process.

• 2018-08-25 16:23

  AWS S3 event aggregation with Lambda and DynamoDB

  S3 has had event notifications since 2014 and for individual object notifications these events work well with Lambda, allowing you to perform an action on every object event in a bucket. It is harder to use this approach when you want to perform an action a limited number of times or at an aggregated bucket level. An example use case would be refreshing a dependency (like Storage Gateway RefreshCache) when you are expecting a large number of objects events in a bucket. Performing a relatively expensive action for every event is not practical or efficient in this case. This post provides a solution for aggregating these events using Lambda, DynamoDB, and SQS.

  
  

  Update (June/July 2020)

  Cache refresh can now be automated. The event aggregation approach below may still be useful depending on your requirements.