Amazon CloudWatch improved significantly over the years. It's time to look at its monitoring capabilities again. CloudWatch is an excellent starting point to implement enhanced monitoring on AWS. In this episode, Michael demonstrates what you can do with CloudWatch metrics and alarms. Metrics provide a time-series database for telemetry (e.g., CPU utilization of an EC2 instance). Alarms watch a metric and trigger actions if a threshold is reached.

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 NAT Gateway or Public Subnet? VPC Endpoints or NAT Gateway? CloudFront or Akamai, Cloudflare, Fastly ...? Route 53 Resolver or Public Hosted Zone?

You can run your application on virtual machines using EC2. If you prefer containers, ECS Fargate is your choice. But you can also use the latest Serverless capabilities to run your application on Lambda. But what's the best option for your project?

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, recently. While doing so I had a look into the technical details as well.

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.

Are you planning to start the cloud journey for your organization soon? Learn from others to turn your initiative into a huge success. Michael and I have accompanied medium-sized businesses and enterprises in their transformation projects and would like to share our learnings with you.

re:Invent was a blast: five days packed with announcements of new services and features. We have created a top 10 list for our re:Invent recap. Here is all you need to know about re:Invent 2019.

AWS made a prominent announcement on November 6th, 2019: AWS Savings Plans. It was never easier to get a discount on compute capacity by committing to a monthly consumption and paying upfront. This blog post introduced AWS Savings Plans and compares them to other options to reduce your AWS bill as well.

Andreas is reviewing the AWS Global Accelerator. AWS introduced Global Accelerator at re:Invent in 2018. A year after that, it is about time to review the service. AWS Global Accelerator makes use of Amazon’s worldwide infrastructure and is designed to improve the performance and reliability of your applications.

We love simplicity! Our blog runs on CloudFront and S3 which is maintenance free and does handle traffic spikes easily. We use the static website generator hexo to publish our content. Lambda@Edge handles redirects and generates optimized images on the fly. Instead of Google Analytics we are using Athena and QuickSight to get statistics about our blog and posts.