AWS EFS & S3 Case Study

By | February 19, 2019

I recently helped a customer migrate from Azure to AWS and they had some unique and interesting storage needs that I thought would be excellent material for a blog post. What made this particular design interesting from a storage perspective was the customer’s syncing requirements. Background Customer X was having some issues with their Azure… Read More »

Using AWS Server Migration Service (SMS)

By | November 7, 2019

In my previous article I described how to establish a VPN connection between an AWS VPC and an on-premises datacenter. The next logical step is moving workloads up to the VPC! In this article we’re going to use AWS native SMS service to do just that. Pre-requisites for a VMware based environment here’s the tl;dr:… Read More »

Category: AWS

Establishing a VPN connection between the Mistwire homelab and AWS

By | June 14, 2018

I wanted to setup a VPN connection between my homelab (which is now running a Ubiquiti Networks – Unfi Security Gateway), but there wasn’t a lot of good information on the how-to of said endeavor out there. So… fodder for a new article! Phase 1 – Create a new test VPC with a VPN I’m… Read More »

Category: AWS

How to change the size of your AWS RDS with zero downtime

By | March 5, 2018

I was playing with a multi-AZ RDS the other day and noticed that I was burning money more quickly than I had anticipated/wanted, so I decided to go to a smaller instance size that wasn’t as expensive (until the environment was under production load performance wasn’t that important). Maybe I should take a step back.  AWS… Read More »

Category: AWS

AWS re:Invent re:Cap 2017

By | December 4, 2017

This was my very first AWS re:Invent conference and there are so many things to talk about!  New announcements, new friends, a list of do’s & don’ts for the next time I attend!   AWS Services First off, I’m going to briefly talk about the new services that have were announced, but I’m not going… Read More »

Category: AWS

Use AWS Lambda to schedule instance starts/stops and save some money!

By | September 30, 2017

I’m currently running a PoC and I only want the systems available to play with Monday – Friday, 9am to 5pm EST.  In order to save a good bit of money I’ve decided to turn off the instances at night.  I’m also super lazy, so I don’t want to have to log into the servers… Read More »

Category: AWS

The AWS Portsmouth User Group is now official!

By | April 18, 2017

Steve Viens, Tim Durgan and I started a new AWS User Group for the Portsmouth, New Hampshire area! We had our first meetup 4/11 at the GreenPages office (Thanks Ron!). If you are in the area, you can join us by signing up here: https://www.meetup.com/aws-portsmouth-user-group/ Here is the YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCTFF5am-14H93VSg3fk_4Q Our first presenter was Brian Tarbox… Read More »

Category: AWS

Connecting the Mistwire VMware Homelab to an AWS VPC

By | February 20, 2017

Something that I had been meaning to do for a long time was to create a VPN connection between my home lab (a VMware based nested ESXi environment in my basement) to one of my AWS VPCs. Overview – As this is a simple setup, we’re going to go with a single VPN connection scenario:… Read More »

Category: AWS

My Experience with the AWS Solutions Architect Pro (AWS-PSA) Exam

By | January 15, 2017

It took me 2 times to pass this test and I have to say, it is a very difficult and rather sneaky exam 😉 To start off, this is the progression of study material that I used, in order: Watched the excellent acloud.guru video series. Read all of the whitepapers in the recommended reading list as… Read More »

AWS Certified Solutions Architect Pro – Study Notes Domain 8

By | November 29, 2016

Domain 8.0: Cloud Migration and Hybrid Architecture (10% of exam) 8.1 Plan and execute for applications migrations 8.2 Demonstrate ability to design hybrid cloud architectures VMware Integration AWS management portal for vCenter: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/vcenter-portal/ Portal installs as a vCenter plug-in Enables you to migrate VMware VMs to EC2 & Manage AWS resources from within vCenter Use… Read More »