Introduction Amazon WorkSpaces provides a mechanism to rapidly deploy cloud-based desktop systems that can be used by software developers, call center representatives, knowledge workers, and nearly any other role. They’re great for short-term contractor roles as well, since they don’t require physical procurement of any new hardware. In the rest …
In Amazon Web Services (AWS) Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), each VPC has a default route table, known as the “main” route table. If you want to identify the route table that is considered the “main” route table, it can be a little challenging. Using the Get-EC2RouteTable command, you might notice …
Problem Statement Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) is a relatively easy mechanism to improve the security of your Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud environment. Instead of logging into the AWS Management Console using a username and password, you also have to provide a time-based one-time password (TOTP). The same concept applies when …
Problem Statement If you’ve ever launched an Amazon EC2 instance (aka. virtual machine), you’re probably familiar with the concept of an Amazon Machine Image (AMI). AMIs are simply virtual machine images that you can launch your EC2 instance with. Because anyone can publish a custom AMI, and because AWS has …
Although I’m not a user interface designer professionally, I have some rather strong opinions about how user interfaces should be implemented. After all, I use a variety of different software on a daily basis, ranging from Google Chrome, Firefox, Gmail, Google Calendar, Asana, Spotify, and many others. In my mind, …
If you’re like me, you try to automate everything, even the small stuff. I have a few Bluetooth devices that I occasionally use with my MacBook Pro: Apple Magic Trackpad 2 Apple Magic Keyboard Bose QuietComfort 35 Sennheiser PXC550 Getting Bluetooth devices powered on and connected isn’t always the easiest …
If you’re developing with Python and the Amazon Web Services (AWS) boto3 module, you probably wish you had type hints (aka. auto-complete / Intellisense) in Microsoft Visual Studio Code. Even though the boto3 documentation is exceptionally good, it’s annoying to constantly have to switch back and forth between it and …
You can use the AWS PowerShell module to create DynamoDB tables. If you need help setting up the AWS PowerShell module, start by watching this video. There’s a helper function called New-DDBSchema, which creates a .NET TableSchema object. Start by assigning the output from this command to a variable; you …
Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides some built-in parameters in the AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store service, which expose pointers to the latest version of Amazon Machine Images (AMI) for Windows Server and Amazon Linux. These special parameters are called “public parameters” in the Parameter Store services; for more information, check …
While developing a CloudFormation template recently, I received a variety of different error messages from the AWS CloudFormation service. These errors predominantly were centered around the AWS Systems Manager service, which enables you to perform automation tasks. One such automation task that I wanted to perform was to deploy a …
