As I have been developing and testing on Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosting I have made much use of the Identity and Access Management (IAM) feature. In particular, I have found the IAM Roles to be extremely helpful. I can assign a role to a specific instance or even a launch group of instances. When those instances are launched they have all the permissions of the role that I have specified for them. This means that if an instance needs to access files that are on S3, I just add that permission to the role and the instance is able to access S3 files. This is extremely useful for system admin scripts as well as other programming tasks.
Continue reading AWS IAM Roles
Category Archives: AWS
AWS 101
An intro to AWS.
I guess I should explain the learning curve bit. When I started learning AWS, I did not really have a mentor and the documentation was either too vague and filled with propaganda for other services or too verbose and not at the level that I needed. An AWS admin can interface with their products through the web console, CLI, or through their API. There are tons of products out there that use their API to make different aspect of interfacing with their products easier. For the most part, most of my interactions with AWS is done through their web console. The learning curve and their new way of thinking is in how they have taken all the aspects of hosting and split them up into different categories and products. They all work together very well, but understanding what is available and how they go together takes some time. Also, using the products is sometimes a different kind of intuitive. In a way, it is like moving from Windows to a Mac. On windows most things are done in a counter-intuitive way. So when you use a Mac and things are done in an intuitive way you are not used to it so it throws you off. There are also tons of options. It can be overwhelming.
Continue reading AWS 101