Performance instrumentation and monitoring for .NET applications - Are you confident you can quickly identify service problems and resolve performance issues at scale? Isolating and remediating performance problems in the cloud, particularly with modern, distributed microservice architectures, can pose unique challenges. This session shows you how to capture logs, metrics, and telemetry for .NET applications across servers, containers, serverless architectures, and related components. Whether you are running IIS on a Windows server or Kestrel in a Linux container, learn how AWS services such as Amazon CloudWatch, CloudWatch Application Insights, AWS X-Ray, and more can cut through the chaos, isolate application performance issues, and troubleshoot the root cause of problems.

Cloud Storage and Trailing Slashes

Shortly after configuring this site to be served simultaneously from AWS, Azure and GCP, I realize I had a bug. Occasionaly the images were not loading. Ironically this was only happening on the Multi-Cloud Blogging post. After some investigation, I found this caused by how various providers handle a URI without a trailing slash. Specifically Azure.

The Issue

When I render the footer of this blog, I include the name of the cloud provider that served the page. I also include a link to the post describing how it’s all configured. When I created that link, I left off the trailing slash in the URI. For example http://blog.brianbeach.com/posts/2019-12-30-multi-cloud-blog.

I spent some time over Thanksgiving moving my blog from Blogger to Hugo. I have been hosting my site in an Amazon S3 bucket with an automated build in AWS CodeBuild. That has been running well for the past month and I have worked out most of the kinks. So, I decided to make my blog Multi-Cloud and host it on AWS, Azure, and GCP while load balancing traffic across the three platforms. The footer at the bottom of each page will tell you where the page is served from. I also moved the build process to GitHub Action so I was not dependent on AWS for continuous integration.

I have been helping test the new capability to Seamlessly join a Linux EC2 instance to your AWS Managed Microsoft AD directory. The domain join service account will get locked out after a 45 days unless you change the password. Therefore, I created a Lambda function to rotate secrets for the Directory Service. Here is an example template that uses the template.

When I first moved over to Hugo, I struggled to get the robots meta tag working. Note that I am using the Ananke theme and this may be different for other themes.

Primer

Honestly, I have not spent a lot of time in my career on SEO and did not have a deep understanding of how the robots meta-tag and robots.txt file work. Here is a quick primer. First, a page can include a meta-tag in the header that specifies that a page should be indexed by search engines or not. In addition, you can specify that search engines should or should not follow links on that page. For example, the following says that search engines should both index the page and follow links.

A life-cycle approach to governance, compliance, and audit - Ongoing implementation of regulations by governments across a variety of industries requires organizations to adopt enterprise solutions that fulfill needs relating to compliance, audit, and overall risk management. Join us to learn more about how Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudFormation, AWS Config, and AWS CloudTrail can help with enhanced controls, beginning with resource provisioning through to monitoring, remediation, event audit, and issue investigation.

Manage Windows instances at scale with Systems Manager - Get hands-on experience managing Windows servers with AWS Systems Manager. Examples include the life cycle of an application, automating the creation and management of a “golden AMI,” domain join, application installation, patching, and collecting inventory. Experience with Windows administration and PowerShell are expected for this session. Please bring a laptop (and charger) for the hands-on exercises.

CloudFormation template used in the workshop

High-velocity service delivery: Infrastructure as code - Customers today are looking to the cloud to help them evolve, adapt, and innovate faster than ever. In this chalk talk, learn how to use AWS native services to increase your organization’s ability to deliver at high velocity using services like AWS CloudFormation, AWS OpsWorks, and AWS Systems Manager. We talk about best practices to help you provision and manage infrastructure, deploy code, and automate your software-release processes.

I have been moving my blog to Hugo over the holiday weekend. I am working in a Cloud9 instance. Cloud9 allows you to preview an application running in the Cloud9 instance by proxying the connection through the Cloud9 service. The URL for the proxy uses the following format.

1

https://CLOUD9_ENV_ID.vfs.cloud9.AWS_REGION.amazonaws.com/

The problem is that Hugo renders fully qualified URLs that include the baseURL found in the config file. I could update the config file, but I know I am going to accidentally check it in that way.

Advancing to the Cloud with Amazon Web Services - I’ll be presenting at EDUCAUSE 2019.

You can see details here.

Presented a webinar to researchers along with Carahsoft.

The completely revised and expanded Pro PowerShell for Amazon Web Services is written specifically for Windows professionals who already know PowerShell and want to learn to host Windows workloads on Amazon Web Services. The cloud offers information technology workers significant cost savings and agility unimaginable even just a few years ago. Tasks that traditionally took weeks of work, costing thousands of dollars, can be completed in minutes for a fraction of a penny.

Presented to students in a summer program on machine learning.

AWS Direct Connect and Transit Gateway I’ll be presenting to the Internet2 Cloud Community on how to use Internet2’s Cloud Connect with AWS Direct Connect and Transit Gateway.

You can see details here.

I have been working on a project to deploy Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) at an Academic Medical Center. They want to deploy a private cluster that does not have internet acess. EKS supports this, but DNS resolution can be tricky. There is an AWS blog post that explains how do it.

Ultimately, we need an inbound R53 resolver ENI in the EKS VPC. When you configure EKS with a private endpoint it configures DNS to only respond to requests from within the VPC. The blog post describes this in detail, but I found it a little hard to follow. I needed to draw a diagram to make sense of it. So here are my notes.

I’ll be presenting for the second year on HPC, Machine Learning, and Big Data to researchers from around the globe today in Arcot Rajasekar Cyber Carpentry Workshop at UNC. You can see details here.

SVC310 Improve operations with AWS Systems Manager OpsCenter - I’ll be presenting a Chalk Talk at the New York Summit 2019.

https://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/improve-operations-with-aws-systems-manager-opscenter-svc310-new-york-aws-summit?qid=c35e3140-0788-4b75-b57e-93d8760245d0&v=&b=&from_search=23

Microsoft SQL Server Migration Strategies - Migrating SQL Server databases to the cloud is a critical part of a cloud journey and requires planning and architectural considerations. In this session, we cover best practices and guidelines in migrating and/or architecting a hybrid SQL Server architecture on AWS. We compare and contrast various migration methods, including SQL export, backup and restore, and using AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS). We also provide guidance on how to migrate products that have approached their end of life, such as SQL Server 2008.

Self-service remediation, managing configuration drift, & automation - I’ll be presenting a Chalk Talk at Chicago AWS Public Sector Summit 2019.

https://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/selfservice-remediation-managing-configuration-drift-automation-svc311-chicago-aws-summit?qid=c35e3140-0788-4b75-b57e-93d8760245d0&v=&b=&from_search=25

AWS Organizations and Control Tower - I’ll be presenting to the Internet2 Cloud Community on AWS Organizations and Control Tower today.

You can see details here.

Keynote Speaker - Learn and brainstorm how we store, retrieve, integrate, and use our data to help drive Cornell into the future. Additionally, Brian Beach, Solutions Architect from Amazon Web Services will be one of our keynote speakers.

https://events.cornell.edu/event/itcornell_symposium_on_big_data

I wrote this blog post explaining how to integrate AppStream with an LMS.

Hands-On Automating AWS Infrastructure with PowerShell - n this Workshop, we will introduce you to the AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell/PowerShell Core and discuss the fundamentals for automating infrastructure on AWS using PowerShell. We have provided a set of challenges that you can choose from as a way to help you learn how you can use PowerShell to automate infrastructure on AWS in a variety of real-world scenarios. You can see these challenges in the table of contents to the left of this page.

Building a Migration Strategy for SQL Server on AWS - I’ll be presenting a workshop at re:Invent 2018.

Slides

Workshop Instructions

CloudFormation Template

Sample Schema on GitHub