Notes from the work

AWS GuardDuty analyses various events happening on your AWS account and can notify you when suspicious activity takes place. Right now, GuardDuty is specific to a region and needs to be enabled in each region you want to monitor (though AWS recommends you enable it in all regions to ensure global actions are monitored). Going through GuardDuty console in every AWS region can be a daunting task, and quite time consuming if you have multiple AWS accounts which you’d like to connect into Master-Member setup. Luckily, CloudFormation supports enabling and setting up GuardDuty detectors, so you can use it to make it a little bit less painful.

If you’re keeping in touch with new services provided by AWS, you probably heard about new security monitoring tool: GuardDuty. You probably also noticed a whole new family of Elastic Load Balancers (v2), which includes Network Load Balancers (NLB). Deploying those two new services may generate some unexpected results - and here’s why.

Creating snapshots from EBS drives attached to your EC2 instances is the most basic way of backing up your data. While you have to be cautious when snapshotting running EC2 instances without restart, doing it regularly is a base of many disaster recovery plans. In the latest update to aws-maintenance repo on GitHub you’ll find a complete code and CloudFormation template that will make this as painless a process as possible.

After my previous post about a complete code for automated RDS cross-region backup copy, some issues and new feature requests have been raised on GitHub (thanks for that!) - and with your help, support for encrypted RDS instances and Aurora Clusters have now been added!

After posting the previous post on this topic (Copying RDS snapshot to another region for cross-region recovery) , I noticed a lot of people being interested in using the code I provided as an example. Many were not sure how to make use of it, and after a couple of pull requests it became obvious that a complete, fully-working code and CloudFormation template would be a good idea. So, yesterday, I pushed an update to aws-maintenance repository with a fully working code, which you can easily customize via CloudFormation parameters to match your needs.