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 …
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 …
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 …
I am running Ubuntu Linux virtual machines on VMware ESXi (vSphere Hypervisor), and needed a mechanism to add SCSI disks to VMs without having to reboot. After adding the disk in VMware ESXi, the disk still wasn’t visible to the guest operating system. It seemed like I needed some mechanism …
Background Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud9 provides a cloud-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE) where you can author, test, and deploy your .NET Core and PowerShell-based applications. You can connect to your Cloud9 IDE using a web browser. One of my favorite features offered by Cloud9, that enables developers to comfortably …
Introduction Software developers, infrastructure & DevOps engineers, and operational IT staff are heavy users of the command line. The benefits of the command line are clear: Commands are / should be readable Commands are repeatable Commands can be shared amongst a team (eg. via source control / chat / etc.) …
The Azure PowerShell Extensions module (AzureExt) for Windows PowerShell has seen another interesting update! Let’s take a look at some of the high-level changes: External dependencies have been completely removed The module now supports PowerShell ISE Snippets for Azure Resource Manager (ARM) Resources New command: Remove-AzureRmResourceGroupGui New command: Start-AzureRM Check …
Do you have a lot of large photos that you’d like to resize, to reduce upload times, and make more friendly for the web? Check out this free picture re-sizing extension for Windows! I’ve been using this on Windows 10 Enterprise RTM (Build 1024), and it works great! It’s an …
