This month I’ve attended the Craft Conference. Last time I used my laptop to take notes, but this time, I tried a new setup to save some space in my backpack: an Android smartphone with a Bluetooth keyboard.

All too often I see companies having opened an AWS account jump right in and start deploying systems. This is fine when the project is in the development phase without production resources like databases filled with customer data or third-party integrations. But time goes on and at one point the system under development goes into production and while everybody is happy that it finally happened – and quite possibly the easing of the time pressure – few think about how to it will be secure in the long run. More often than not, this single account will be used for continuing development next to the production resources.

Despite my ambivalent feeling about CloudFormation I use it a lot, but managing stacks through the Console is a pain. Fortunately, this service enjoys the same CLI support most other ones do, so it is just a matter of scripting to make it more developer-friendly.

Maybe you have a few instances that are running 24/7 and you were thinking about using Reserved Instances (RIs for short) to save a significant amount of money. After all, according to AWS, a reduction of up to 75% is quite significant. Then you made the leap and paid for the reservation, and you are sleeping better knowing that the next bill will be considerably smaller than the last one.