August 2, 2021

Cross Region Dynamodb Backups

I’ve been using DynamoDB recently for a few projects and ran into something that I didn’t really expect to be a problem, but there wasn’t an out-of-the-box solution. Cross Region Snapshots It seems that while you can do point-in-time recovery and create manual snapshots, there is no way to copy these snapshots to another region. There does however exist a process to restore a database from a snapshot from another region. Read more

May 3, 2021

ALB Consolidation

This post isn’t so much about how I consolidated a lot of ALBs, but more about how I saved ~USD$3,300 a year by doing this consolidation. The particular application in question has been running on AWS for a number of years and has 3 environments, test, staging and production. The application is made up of 6 services. (no, I’m not going to call them micro). Each service is an autoscaling group and used to have an ELB attached. Read more

April 5, 2021

Connect Escalation

Connect is a really interesting product with some interesting use cases. I had one come up recently about how to provide an escalated paging service. We needed to restrict access to only Australian mobiles and wanted to also validate that the mobile user was at least some what real. Finally we send a page via Opsgenie. - If you wish to use an alternative service, update the code to your provider. Read more

April 5, 2021

WAF insights with QuickSight

Following on from my last post using Athena to query WAF logs, I decided to take this a big further and look at what I can do with QuickSight to get some insights. Directly quoted from the Amazon QuickSight home page: Amazon QuickSight is a scalable, serverless, embeddable, machine learning-powered business intelligence (BI) service built for the cloud. QuickSight lets you easily create and publish interactive BI dashboards that include Machine Learning-powered insights. Read more

March 23, 2021

Query WAF logs with Athena

I’ve been using AWS WAF a bit recently and I needed a way to query the logs that are shipped to S3. Athena is the logical solution to this. There is great documentation to get you started with querying WAF logs via Athena and also how to setup WAF logging. My specific requirement required me to start off with the WAF in COUNT mode. While WAF has an excellent facility to to see samples, they only last for 3 hours so I needed the ability to get the logs. Read more

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