Get started with AWS or broaden your knowledge while walking, biking, running, driving, or whenever you enjoy listening to podcasts.

Get insights into the day-to-day challenges of builders. In this issue, Monika Oblonczek from our partner tecRacer talks about how cloud migrations succeed.

I was excited when AWS announced Aurora Serverless at re:Invent 2017. Disappointment followed shortly after. Even after Aurora Serverless became a generally available service in August 2018, it was missing important features like multi-AZ deployments and read replication. Unfortunately, the innovative service never achieved a breakthrough. Therefore, I used Aurora Serverless in exceptional cases only. Four years later, AWS is making a fresh start with Aurora Serverless v2. Reason enough to take a closer look at the new service.

Andreas invited John Culkin and Mike Zazon to talk about their latest book: the AWS Cookbook which includes 70 self-contained recipes to help you creatively solve common AWS challenges you'll encounter on your cloud journey.

This show includes the following recipes:

* Testing IAM Policies with the IAM Policy Simulator
* Automatically Scanning Images in ECR for Security
* Redacting PII from text using Amazon Comprehend

And don't forget to get the whole book!

Stephen Kuenzli and I lead several cloud migration projects. In this conversation, we shared our learnings focusing on AWS security and IAM (Identity and Access Management). The result is advice and inspiration that will help you in your daily work. Our conversation is available as a video or podcast episode. In the following, you will also find a summary of our discussion.

Architecting applications on AWS is challenging. On the one hand, you need a broad understanding of AWS services. On the other hand, you have to know the details as well. In this episode, Michael outlines the mindset you need to build on AWS successfully.

Launching an EC2 instance takes minutes. Keeping your virtual machines secure and maintaining your VMs is more work. In this episode, I share seven things to do after launching a Linux, Windows, or macOS instance.

Writing CloudFormation templates from scratch is a lot of work. You will run into many issues along the way: the documentation is incomplete, magic values are required, unsupported combinations of attributes, etc. The feedback cycles are long. In the end, we have to provision real infrastructure to test the template. If you ever created an Elastisearch cluster, you feel the pain. We also observe that AWS architectures follow similar patterns (aka best practices). So why not make a collection of templates and share them with the world? That's what we did in late 2015. We launched Free Templates for AWS CloudFormation. In this episode, Michael provides you an overview of the project and show you typical use cases.

AWS allows us to run applications distributed across EC2 instances and availability zones. By adding load balancers or message queues to the architecture, we can achieve fault tolerance or high availability. But how can we test that our system can survive faults in reality? Assuming an application has five consumers and seven downstream dependencies. What happens if one of them fails? Are all timeouts configured accurately? Are all applications retrying? What happens if the network is slow? So many things can go wrong. It is not possible to understand all consequences upfront. Therefore, a new approach emerged: Chaos Engineering. With chaos engineering, we simulate faults in our systems and observe the consequences. The trick is that we can simulate faults as often as we wish. We don't have to wait for the one day a year where things go horribly wrong. AWS released Fault Injection Simulator (FIS) as a tool to run controlled fault experiments within our AWS accounts.