Whether you prefer to read or watch a video, here are some AWS certification training resources I've put together for you. Study Guides The following study guides include hundreds of assessment questions and answers as well as online access to graded practice exams. The AWS Certified Solutions Architect Study Guide: …

CCNP Enterprise Certification Study Guide: Implementing and Operating Cisco Enterprise Network Core Technologies: Exam 350-401 The practical and conceptual knowledge you need to attain CCNP Enterprise certification. Click the book to view on Amazon. For errata, click here. AWS Certified Solutions Architect Study …

While playing around with AWS CloudWatch Log Insights to analyze VPC flow logs, I thought of a couple of fun ways to identify (probably) malicious traffic. Finding Vulnerability Scanners These are the guys that hammer your box looking for anything from silly SQL injection attacks (so 2005) to CSRF vulnerabilities. The …

People use the term “operational excellence” in a lot of different ways. In its vaguest sense, it means continuous improvement as applied to operations. But you’re interested in what it means in the context of technology operations. And I’m here to tell you that it means automation. Operational Excellence is one of the …

After years of manually upgrading my self-hosted WordPress installation, I decided it was finally time to apply some devops principles (namely automation) to this process. I decided to use AWS Systems Manager (aka SSM). I started out by creating the following Command Document (which happens to be in YAML format because …

If you’ve ever created a private hosted zone in Route 53, you may have noticed it always assigns the same name servers: 1 ns-1536.awsdns-00.co.uk. 2 ns-0.awsdns-00.com. 3 ns-1024.awsdns-00.org. 4 ns-512.awsdns-00.net. The numbers don’t seem to be coincidental. 1536 is the RFC number for “Common DNS Implementation …

My latest course “Architecting for Security on AWS” is now available on Pluralsight! You’ll learn how to secure your data and AWS services using a defense-in-depth approach, including: Protecting your AWS credentials using identity and access management Capturing and analyze logs using CloudTrail, CloudWatch, and …

Puzzled by networking on AWS? Check out my AWS networking deep dive series! AWS Networking Deep Dive: Route 53 DNS Configure Route 53 for any domain name, and configure health checks and routing policies.  AWS Networking Deep Dive: Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Create secure and scalable VPCs. Implement multi-VPC …