Tag: AWS

Simplifying Site-to-Site VPN Connectivity with StrongSwan 

Introduction

As a new member of the team, I was tasked for establishing site-to-site VPN connectivity using a third-party tool. After exploring numerous blogs in search of the perfect solution, I stumbled upon StrongSwan. Excited to put it to the test, I followed the provided guides carefully. However, upon implementation, I encountered a frustrating roadblock: while the tunnel was successfully created, communication between the virtual networks remained elusive.

This blog aims to tackle that very challenge head-on. I’ll be sharing a comprehensive, step-by-step guide to achieve seamless site-to-site VPN connectivity between two cloud environments. Guess, what’s the best part? The same principles can be effortlessly applied to on-premise infrastructure setups as well.

But, what if your cloud provider doesn’t offer managed services for site-to-site VPN connectivity? Or if the process for establishing site-to-site VPN connectivity using managed services requires different configurations and setup steps? Don’t worry, we’ll address those scenarios too.

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Navigating AWS FinOps: Harnessing Cloud Intelligence Dashboards for Strategic Cost Optimization


The Cloud Intelligence Dashboards represent an open-source framework crafted and nurtured by a dedicated community of AWS enthusiasts. These dashboards are designed to deliver actionable insights and scalability for organizations, with a focus on customer satisfaction. The functionalities of these dashboards extend to fostering financial accountability, optimizing costs, monitoring usage goals, implementing governance best practices, and attaining operational excellence across all Well-Architected pillars. It includes multiple dashboards:

  • CUDOS Dashboard
  • Cost Intelligence Dashboard
  • KPI Dashboard
  • TAO Dashboard
  • Compute Optimizer Dashboard
  • Cost Anomaly Dashboard
CUDOS Dashboard

The CUDOS Dashboard offers comprehensive overviews and operational insights, allowing users to delve into resource-specific details. Users can discover automatically generated recommendations for cost optimization and actionable insights within the CUDOS Dashboard. These insights readily apply to FinOps practitioners, Product Owners, and Engineering teams. The dashboard facilitates swift identification of usage spikes and reveals uncertainties in AWS consumption, highlighting specific resources that can be optimized.

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Architecting Success: Best Practices for Implementing AWS Control Tower

As organizations increasingly migrate their workloads to the cloud, effective cloud governance becomes paramount. AWS Control Tower is a comprehensive service designed to simplify and scale the setup and management of a secure and compliant multi-account AWS environment. To leverage the full potential of AWS Control Tower, it’s essential to follow best practices that optimize operations, strengthen security, and achieve compliance. In this blog post, we’ll explore key best practices for using AWS Control Tower.

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ECS | Capacity Provider Strategy

Introduction:

In the previous blog post, we covered the topic of Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and delved into how this service can be effectively utilized. If you haven’t had a chance to explore that blog yet, we highly recommend visiting it to gain a deeper understanding of ECS and its practical applications.

link: https://opstree.com/blog//2023/09/19/applications-hosting-on-ecs/


In this blog, we will explore the concept of Capacity Providers in Amazon ECS. We’ll delve into the reasons for choosing Capacity Providers in Amazon ECS, understand how they function, examine the various types of Capacity Providers, explore the significance of weight and base settings within Capacity Providers, and take a closer look at the potential drawbacks associated with their usage.

What is a Capacity Provider:

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) is a robust container orchestration service offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), designed to simplify the deployment, management, and scaling of containerized applications. At the heart of ECS lies the concept of Capacity Providers. It’s a fundamental element streamlining the intricate process of managing the compute resources that underpin your containerized workloads.

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Amazon ECR Container Images Across Accounts or Regions

Want to implement an AWS Elastic Container Registry Replication practice in your DevOps solution? But don’t know how to start and where to go. Folks, now you are on the right path.

We’re pursuing this to safeguard our production resources in the ap-south-1 (Mumbai) region from potential disasters and connectivity issues. Ensuring resource distribution across other AWS regions is critical. Our microservices-driven applications rely on Docker images, including custom ones crucial for disaster recovery. AWS Container Registry offers a secure, efficient solution for storing and managing Docker images, simplifying image storage, and enabling seamless sharing across private or public environments.

So, here you may wonder how we can replicate the same images from its registry to another AWS Account(cross-accounts) or in the same account in different regions(cross-region).

Pre-requisite: 

  1. Need two AWS Accounts with admin access to Amazon ECR service and programmatic access for it(to pull/push images).
  2. Login/Signup:  https://aws.amazon.com/console/

Note: 1st AWS Account: Source account

2nd AWS Account: Destination account

The architecture

Enough theory part let’s take action for this,

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