Recently, I needed to monitor my auto scaling groups in AWS, to see why they weren’t scaling up properly. Although I can use the AWS management console to monitor these activity messages, it isn’t very efficient to continuously click the refresh button. Hence, I wanted to automate the process of …
I wanted to get notified any time there was a new BIOS update for the motherboard that I use on one of my desktop systems, which is an ASRock Phantom Gaming 4. Unfortunately, most motherboard manufacturers have terrible websites, that are hard to navigate, so I had to improvise. One …
Hey folks, about a month ago I joined CBT Nuggets as a full-time trainer. Since then, I’ve been working on producing high-quality training content around topics like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and PowerShell for our learners to consume and build off of! So far, I’ve got several skills published, which …
These days, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic and social distancing, people are spending a lot more time on conference calls from home. According to VentureBeat, Zoom raced from 3 million to 200 million users in just one quarter! Not everyone has a dedicated home office setup, since prior to the …
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, …
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 …
