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.

We coached developers building their first Serverless applications for a large company recently and want to share our learnings and observations with you.

I completed my first AWS certification in 2014: AWS Solutions Architect Associate. During the following years, I accomplished all five associate and professional certificates. However, Michael and I decided not to renew our AWS certifications about a year ago. In the following, I will share five good reasons not to get AWS certified!

Elastic Block Storage (EBS) provides solid state drives (SSD) and hard disk drives (HDD) for EC2 instances. The virtual machine accesses the persistent storage via the network. In December 2020, AWS announced another volume type called General Purpose SSD (gp3). So now there are three volume types based on SSDs. In this episode, Andreas compares gp2, gp3, and io2 volumes and guides how to choose the volume type that fits best a specific scenario.

Werner Vogels's keynote was a blast and definitely the highlight of re:Invent 2020. Michael and I are going through the announced features and services. As usual, we also take a look at the technical details.

Are you following the Infrastructure as Code approach using CloudFormation? If so, I bet you encountered a situation where CloudFormation misses support for a service's latest features. I run into those issues weekly! So what can we do about it?