Managing EC2 servers at scale: Ansible and RunCommand

12 February 2019, Tamás Sallai
I still remember the first time I had to deploy a changeset to a production server. It was at my first job roughly ten years ago, and I wasn’t usually doing operations. I had a colleague who did the deployments, but he was missing that day. I was handed a paper with a list with ~25 bullet points, each describing a manual task I had to do. Fortunately, I am quite good at following a process, so everything went smoothly.
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AWS: How to get notified on IAM user logins

05 February 2019, Tamás Sallai
The approach with the Event Rule, described in the previous post, works only for the root user. If you try to remove the criterion, you’ll get the impression that it is working, but contrary to the root user, IAM users can choose the region they use to log in. That means an Event Rule defined in the us-east-1 region will only notify you about logins in that region.
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AWS: How to get notified on root account login

30 January 2019, Tamás Sallai
One of the first mistake people do is to use the root account for day-to-day tasks. It makes sense, as AWS provides this user, so why not use it? But it is so powerful and replacing it with a lesser user is so easy, there is hardly any justifiable reason not to get rid of it.
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The rocky path to delete an AWS Organizations member account

22 January 2019, Tamás Sallai
Organizations is a wonderful service in the AWS ecosystem, both for usability and security. While the cloud provides a lot of security controls within an account, a multi-account setup is far superior in several ways.
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