Saturday, November 30, 2013

AWS S3 temporary access to S3 bucket files

Sharing files using S3 can be easily be done in the S3 buckets permission by adding 'everyone' to the permissions on the buckets and files. However, you probably don't want any person in the world accessing your files. Here are a couple of quick and easy methods.

1. Temporary URL : Use a tool like S3Fox and you can get a pre-signed URL with a time limit.  This limitation with this approach is that if you have a large number of files you need to generate and send a URL for each file.



2. IAM User : The policies you need to use can be found here: http://mikeferrier.com/2011/10/27/granting-access-to-a-single-s3-bucket-using-amazon-iam/

You also need to provide the URL for IAM user sign-in URL for your account, the IAM user, and the IAM user password. Remember, you need to add a password to the user after you create it.


It is then easy to delete this user or change the password to make sure that if this URL, account and password gets into the wrong hands your files are not downloaded.

Friday, November 29, 2013

Running Microsoft and Oracle Stacks on Elastic Block Store

This session is focused on using Elastic Block Storage (EBS) with Oracle Databases on AWS:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9eUmhvgMwY

Disaster Recovery Site on AWS - Minimal Cost Maximum Efficiency

This session has a demonstration of how to configure a DR solution on AWS:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01hSWAOJGLY

AWS Storage Tiering for Enterprise Workloads

This a replay of the AWS reInvent session that covers storage tiering options for running Oracle Enterprise workloads such as Oracle Databases on AWS:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5Il80bhQCI

Slides:
http://www.slideshare.net/tomlaszewski/aws-storage-tiering-for-enterprise-workloads

ReInvent 2013 : Using Amazon RDS to Power Enterprise Applications

Here the replay from reInvent.  A lot of details about Oracle RDS.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=348Nu4qyNDo

Monday, November 18, 2013

AWS Database reference implementation

This reference implementation provides the architecture and associated CloudFormation templates for a standard, enterprise class, large enterprise class and high performance Oracle 11g configuration on AWS EC2:
http://media.amazonwebservices.com/AWS_RDBMS_Oracle_11g_on_EC2_Reference_Architecture.pdf

Friday, November 8, 2013

Migrating from Oracle EE to SE on AWS RDS

There isn’t an easy way to do an in-place conversion from Oracle EE database to SE. This is true whether the database is on RDS, on premise, or running on EC2. This is because Oracle EE supports many different options that are not available in Oracle SE. Therefore, exporting and importing would be the only way to do it.

ELB : Some common questions

Q: Is a straight through reverse proxy possible with ELB? For example, a Wordpress instance that lives at my domain.com/blog.  Is it possible with ELB similar to apaches mod_proxy passthru functionality?
A: ELB does not support this feature.  Suggestions: Create a sub-domain like blogs.crafsy.com and have a separate DNS record + ELB for it.

Q: Is there a way to force traffic to a particular backend app server when fronted with ELB? 
A: ELB supports sticky sessions for ensuring that traffic within the same session flows to the same box.  For software release purposes, you could have a subdomain like test.craftsy.com and a separate DNS record + ELB.

Q: Can you have a zone apex in Route53 point at multiple ELB's? I assume this is so. (e.g. craftsy.com -> ELB1 (production a), ELB2 (production b)
A: Yes, if you use non-simple routing policy (weighted, latency or failover). 


Thursday, November 7, 2013

Fixed MAC address for EC2 instances

Some software licenses require a fixed MAC address to exist.  Running on AWS EC2 the instance will get a new MAC address on reboot or shutdown or restart.  I way to ensure the new EC2 instance will get the same MAC address is to use an Elastic Network Interfaces (ENI).  ENI is like an additional network card that have fixed IP address (internal and external) and fixed MAC address.

Tape migration to AWS Glacier

Here is a new offering from CA that bundles Riverbed software and AWS Glacier to provide the capability to move tape to AWS Glacier for long term archiving:

https://portal.reinvent.awsevents.com/connect/search.ww#loadSearch-searchPhrase=&searchType=session&tc=0&sortBy=daytime&dayID=32&p=&i(10007)=10020&i(10007)=10024