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Monthly Archives: May 2016
The AWS Pricing ‘API’: A kafkaesque nightmare in JSON format
Today, I have been working with the AWS Pricing API.
Well, I say “working”. What I’ve actually been doing is mashing my face into the keyboard in-between sobs of unrestrained depression and screams of literal horror.
You see, the AWS Pricing API is not very good. It’s not even, strictly speaking, an API. Allow me to introduce you to it. Continue reading →
Using PowerShell to extract and report on AWS CloudWatch Metrics
Here at Planet Domain we have a lot of day to day challenges in performance and cost management.
We built a fantastic CD pipeline that allows our developers to rapidly spin up new infrastructure, enabling them to quickly build, test and deploy new features with minimal assistance from the Ops team.
Unfortunately, it also allows our developers to rapidly spin up new infrastructure than then lays idle for the greater part of the day, sucking money out of budget that could otherwise be used on beer, pizza and Xbox accessories.
Now, Cloudwatch is great, but it does tend to involve a lot of clicky-clicky mouse-movey, clicky-clicky stuff in the AWS console. And once you’ve got a lot of points to monitor, the graphs become unreadable. And the filtering options are sometimes finnicky, and it’s not easy to automate things like CloudWatch Dashboards using CloudFormation.
So to get a report on average CPU utilization across our AWS Autoscaling Groups, I turned to PowerShell. Continue reading →
AWS Sydney Summit Roundup: Serverless is here
This past week saw AWS’s Sydney Summit at the historic Hordern Pavilion. While many saw the “coming soon” announcements as a slight disappointment (Lambda coming soon. API gateway coming soon. Everything else: coming soon), I – and am not the only one – saw it as a bit of a wakeup call.
In fact, this is really my only major takeaway from the summit:
Serverless architecture is coming. Get on board.
Lambda was launched to beta in late 2014 and to general availability in April 2015 to much fanfare, but as always with AWS, only in a subset of regions. Since then, it’s expanded out to encompass Virginia, Oregon, Ireland, Frankfurt and Tokyo.
It’s been much talked of in Australian Cloud circles – so much so that I freely admit to feeling a degree of Lambda Fatigue at meetups and conferences over the last year or so.
But the actual release of Lambda in ap-southeast-2 is imminent. And with it will come a fundamental shift in the way many of us in Australian Cloud circles need to think about Cloud infrastructure, because the potential advanatages in cost, development time and scalability are just too big to ignore. If you’re going all-in on cloud and your plans don’t include Lambda somewhere, then you’re probably doing something badly wrong. Continue reading →
