I was recently debugging an issue with a fleet of Apache web servers. I needed to watch for some low level network events we felt might be causing an issue (TCP resets, etc.). I thought CloudWatch …

In the last two posts (part 1, part 2) in this series we used PowerShell to gleam information from our monthly AWS billing report. While you can use those scripts to learn a great amount of …

It took 6 months but I finally got time to continue the series on Decoding Your AWS bill. In the last post, we used PowerShell to download and query the monthly bill. In this post we use tags to …

I have been testing a a preview of a new PowerShell command, Import-EC2Instance, that will be added to the AWS PowerShell API next week. The new command allows you to import a VM from VMware or …

I have been building a bunch of Windows AMIs for EC2 recently. If the instance fails to build it can be a real bear to diagnose issues. You don’t have access to the console to watch what’s …

When you create an Windows AMI (Amazon Machine Image) it is configured to generate a random server name. Often this name does not meet your needs. Maybe your company has a specific naming convention …

As you begin to adopt AWS you will likely be asked to report on both usage and cost. One way to do this is using the Monthly Billing report. In this post I will show you how to download your bill and …

CloudTrail is new service that logs all AWS API calls to an S3 bucket. While the obvious use case is creating an audit trail for security compliance, there are many other purposes. For example, we …