はてなブックマーク

public SNS Topic with a trigger event every quarter hour Update 2015-10-08: Amazon has released AWS Lambda Scheduled Functions. I recommend using that feature to schedule AWS Lambda functions. In fact, the Unreliable Town Clock switched to use this feature behind the scenes, the day it was announced. Scheduled executions of AWS Lambda functions on an hourly/daily/etc basis is a frequently requeste

In the AWS Lambda Shell Hack article, I present a crude hack that lets me run shell commands in the AWS Lambda environment to explore what might be available to Lambda functions running there. I’ve added a wrapper that lets me type commands on my laptop and see the output of the command run in the Lambda function. This is not production quality software, but you can take a look at it in the alesti

An updated version of this hack is now available: https://alestic.com/2015/06/aws-lambda-shell-2/ Please follow the simpler instructions in the above article instead of the obsolete instructions listed below. I spent the weekend learning just enough JavaScript and nodejs to hack together a Lambda function that runs arbitrary shell commands in the AWS Lambda environment. This hack allows you to exp

how I was surprised by a large AWS charge and how to calculate the break-even point Glacier Archival of S3 Objects Amazon recently introduced a fantastic new feature where S3 objects can be automatically migrated over to Glacier storage based on the S3 bucket, the key prefix, and the number of days after object creation. This makes it trivially easy to drop files in S3, have fast access to them fo

Amazon just announced two related features for getting super-fast, consistent performance with EBS volumes: (1) Provisioned IOPS EBS volumes, and (2) EBS-Optimized Instances. Starting new instances and EBS volumes with these features is fine, but what if you already have some running instances you’d like to upgrade for faster and more consistent disk performance? Given the two AWS features, there

See also: Installing AWS Command Line Tools from Amazon Downloads Here are the steps for installing the AWS command line tools that are currently available as Ubuntu packages. These include: EC2 API tools EC2 AMI tools IAM - Identity and Access Management RDS - Relational Database Service CloudWatch Auto Scaling ElastiCache Starting with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise, these are also available: CloudFor

EBS boot vs. instance-store If you are just getting started with Amazon EC2, then use EBS boot instances and stop reading this article. Forget that you ever heard about instance-store and accept my apology that I just mentioned it. Once you are completely comfortable with using EBS boot instances on EC2, you may (or may not) want to come back here and read why you made a good decision. EC2 experts

Do you want to run short jobs on Amazon EC2 on a recurring schedule, but don’t want to pay for an instance running all the time? Would you like to do this using standard Amazon AWS services without needing an external server to run and terminate the instance? Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is normally used to keep a reasonable number of instances running to handle measured or expected load (e.g., web sit

*Caveats: An upper limit based on the IP address ranges does not tell you what the real number of possible instances is in a given EC2 region. It’s just an upper limit. Amazon is sure to keep requesting, reserving, and announcing more IP addresses than is actively needed by EC2 at any point in time. Only they know the growth buffer percentage that they like to maintain. Amazon may need to use diff

I’m taking a class about using Chef with EC2 by Florian Drescher today and Florian mentioned that he noticed one of the four availability zones in us-east-1 is not currently available for starting new instances. I’ve confirmed this in my own AWS accounts and found that one of the three availability zones in us-west-1 is also unavailable in addition to one of the four availability zones in us-east-

A Personal AWS Blog by Eric Hammond

Amazon Web Services has launched a new EC2 region in Tokyo named ap-northeast-1. Canonical has released new AMIs in this region for the standard Ubuntu releases they are supporting in other regions including AMIs for: Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick (EBS boot and instance-store) Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid (EBS boot and instance-store) Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic (instance-store only) Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Hardy (instance-stor

In a previous article I described how to run an EBS boot AMI with a larger root disk size than the default. That’s fine if you know the size you want before running the instance, but what if you have an EC2 instance already running and you need to increase the size of its root disk without running a different instance? As long as you are ok with a little down time on the EC2 instance (few minutes)

Here are a few little-publicized benefits that were launched with Amazon EC2’s new EBS boot instances: You can lock them from being accidentally terminated; you can prevent termination even when you try to shutdown the server from inside the instance; and you can automatically save your data storage when they are terminated. In discussions with other EC2 users, I’ve found that it is a common feeli

This article is about running a new EC2 instance with a larger boot volume than the default. You can also resize a running EC2 instance. Amazon EC2’s new EBS Boot feature not only provides persistent root disks for instances, but also supports root disks larger than the previous limit of 10GB under S3 based AMIs. Since EBS boot AMIs are implemented by creating a snapshot, the AMI publisher control

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has a dizzying proliferation of credentials, keys, ids, usernames, certificates, passwords, and codes which are used to access and control various account and service features and functionality. I have never met an AWS user who, when they started, did not have trouble figuring out which ones to use when and where, much less why. Amazon is fairly consistent across the docu

In the article Running MySQL on Amazon EC2 with Elastic Block Store I describe the principles involved in using EBS on EC2. Though originally published in 2008, it is still relevant today and is worth reviewing to get context for this article. In the above tutorial, I included a sample script which followed the basic instructions in the article to initiate EBS snapshots of an XFS file system conta

Amazon recently announced the AWS IAM Access Analyzer, a useful tool to help discover if you have granted unintended access to specific types of resources in your AWS account. At the moment, an Access Analyzer needs to be created in each region of each account where you want to run it. Since this manual requirement can be a lot of work, it is a common complaint from customers. Given that Amazon li

Elastic IP Amazon EC2 supports Elastic IP Addresses to implement the effect of having a static IP address for public servers running on EC2. You can point the Elastic IP at any of your EC2 instances, changing the active instance at any time, without changing the IP address seen by the public outside of EC2. This is a valuable feature for things like web and email servers, especially if you need to

user-data Scripts The Ubuntu and Debian EC2 images published on https://alestic.com allow you to send in a startup script using the EC2 user-data parameter when you run a new instance. This functionality is useful for automating the installation and configuration of software on EC2 instances. The basic rule followed by the image is: If the instance user-data starts with the two characters #! then

The official Ubuntu images for EC2 do not allow ssh directly to the root account, but instead provide access through a normal “ubuntu” user account. This practice fits the standard Ubuntu security model available in other environments and, admittedly, can take a bit of getting used to if you are not familiar with it. This document describes how to work inside this environment using the “ubuntu” us

Amazon recently announced the AWS IAM Access Analyzer, a useful tool to help discover if you have granted unintended access to specific types of resources in your AWS account. At the moment, an Access Analyzer needs to be created in each region of each account where you want to run it. Since this manual requirement can be a lot of work, it is a common complaint from customers. Given that Amazon li