The AWS Survival Guide for 2025: A Field Manual for the Brave and the Bankrupt

I give an obnoxious number of conference talks–and I have done so for years. In the last year alone, I’ve been a speaker at over a dozen conferences, including AWS re:Invent, Oracle CodeOne, LatencyConf, and several DevOps Days. So many people have asked questions about my presentation preparation process that I decided to record my […]

A few months back I went to my local testing center and took the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam. As the visually-busy website says, this certification determines the candidate’s ability to define what the AWS cloud is, describe basic architectural principles, and is generally recommended for candidates with at least six months of exposure to […]

Several weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal ran an article about how the Pokémon Company inspects the security practices of its business partners. One prospective unnamed partner had insufficient controls around S3 buckets, so the Pokémon Company declined to partner with them. This is the first time I’ve ever heard of a company taking such […]

The 2018 Last Week in AWS charity t-shirt campaign has launched. Buy a t-shirt to benefit a good cause; this year’s campaign proceeds all go to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Several Amazonians have reached out to me saying they’d like to purchase a shirt, but are concerned that their employer wouldn’t like it due […]

A few thoughts on Disaster Recovery planning in AWS environments that most people apparently gloss right over.

After many years of asking for it, the AWS console now supports YubiKeys!

This blog is a static site built with Pelican. [Editor’s note: this site is now built with WordPress, but the content here is still valid for an awful lot of use cases–just not mine.] The articles (such as this one) are written in Markdown, and then I leverage my ancient UNIX sysadmin roots: make prod […]

I’m going to diverge from AWS specific content this week to talk a bit about Google. GCP is a wonderful technology platform (arguably a few years ahead of AWS on a technology basis). Unfortunately it’s run by Google, who this week reverted to type and announced the death of another beloved consumer service. There have […]

If multi-cloud is crap, and it is, why are so many people talking about it? The only folks pushing for it are vendors who stand to lose everything if multi-cloud doesn’t take off.

The idea of having multiple AWS accounts in your organization broken out not just by team but also by cost center isn’t the terrible idea that some people (including me until a year or two ago!) tend to assume it is. Permit me to explain why.