Determining data sentiment in the Amazon Aurora database using Amazon Comprehend

Problem statement Collecting customer feedback is essential for every business. But collecting is not enough. We must understand and react to them to improve our product and grow the business. Processing feedback manually was a common thing earlier, and many companies still do it nowadays, but we live in the era of machine learning, and […]

Monitoring costs of containerized workloads in EKS using OpenCost and AWS Managed Prometheus / Grafana

Problem statement Using clouds is convenient and has many advantages, like allocating as much workload as you need immediately, deploying globally pretty fast, focusing on business instead of maintaining a data center, etc. But on the other hand, you need to be really careful about costs, understand how cloud providers charge you, and how to […]

Retired third-party CloudFormation extensions. Registering a private extension.

Problem statement A long time ago, we used public third-party CloudFormation extensions to deploy the EKS cluster with deployed Helm charts as part of a single CloudFormation template. AWS introduced many cool things since then, for example, EKS add-ons, so such an approach may not be entirely relevant nowadays. But in our case, the customer […]

Monitoring Kubernetes jobs status in Amazon EKS. Cronitor or Prometheus

Problem statement In the previous post, “How we migrated applications from Heroku to AWS” I described the migration planning, process, and problems encountered. Once we migrated, operations and monitoring became a cornerstone. Just for general understanding, here is what we got after the migration: EKS cluster with several node groups, a set of controllers (Cluster […]

Implementing “sleep” in the CloudFormation stack for the delay caused by IAM eventual consistency

Problem statement Our customer uses Customizations for AWS Control Tower for the account vending. A new account in the specific organizational unit should deploy different resources as a baseline, for example, IAM roles, VPC with all networking components, and ECS cluster for further application deployment. ECS cluster creation requires a service-linked role that should be […]

How we migrated applications from Heroku to AWS. Issues and limitations from AWS and Heroku sides.

Inputs and requirements Our customer had a production-running application in Heroku, consisting of several containerized Web applications and APIs (dynos), PostgreSQL database, Redis, RabbitMQ, and Jobs (Workers) running depending on a message queue in RabbitMQ. The business decision was made to migrate to AWS because Heroku became too expensive, and Automat-it was chosen to design […]

Create an EC2 inventory report in a multi-account AWS environment

Problem statement When a company has ~100 AWS Accounts (12 AWS regions), many different departments, environments, and sandboxes, it may become difficult to look after budgets and resource usage. In this case, we had to check all accounts and regions weekly and create a CSV report with the following fields: Account ID, Account name, Region, […]

Reliable monitoring with AWS-managed Prometheus and Grafana

Problem statement Prometheus is an open-source monitoring system with a dimensional data model, flexible query language, efficient time series database, and a modern alerting approach. It is widely used for monitoring different parts of the infrastructure, including Kubernetes clusters. An excellent helm chart can be used to deploy Prometheus in Kubernetes (Amazon EKS in our […]

Send an agregated security report from AWS Security Hub

Problem statement AWS Security Hub is an excellent service that collects and aggregates security findings from many AWS services (e.g. Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Inspector, Patch Manager, AWS Config, Amazon Macie, etc.) and different third-party tools. It works with multi-account environments and provides informative dashboards in AWS Web Console, but some security standards require continuous monitoring […]

Overview of third-party addons for EKS (Datree, GuardDuty EKS Runtime Monitoring)

This is the third post where we continue the discovery of EKS add-ons. The first one was about Kubecost, Dynatrace, and Istio. The second one was about Teleport. In this one, we will take a look at Datree. Datree secures your Kubernetes by blocking the deployment of misconfigured resources. Amazon GuardDuty EKS Runtime Monitoring will […]