AWS Workspace on Covid

 

We knew 2020 was highly challenging year across the world due to Covid virus spread.  Entire world was forced to work remotely.

Traditionally we have supplied our software engineers with desktop machines rather than laptops in order to get maximum computing power for the money spent. With the pandemic they all went home and took their desktop machines with them, and have been working from there ever since. As the world is recovering back with the potential for a return to office.

The current remote situation leads to one solution to consider Amazon Workspaces, which is a desktop EC2 instance connected to your network via Amazon's Virtual Private Cloud, and streamed to a client.

It would indeed be more flexible to have your own development environment directly within the cloud. Earlier, AWS shared free tier version to explore/experience AWS Workspaces.  It seems there is another extension of the Free Tier ongoing up until 31st of July 2021.

Technical insights are available at https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/faqs/

AWS ELB 504 error

Last couple of weeks, had trouble to resolve the mysterious occurrences of AWS ELB 504 errors in our product development.  Identification of root causes, is not straight forward and difficult to trace and debug the time out error in production.

In general, 504 Gateway Timeout is caused by the using the Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) address. When the ELB is unable to reach the underlying url of the request page during the short process-intensive period required for the database setup, the ELB serves the user a 504 error.

Our problem was not straight case with few challenges to understand.  Got a recent/relevant blog which is the exact match of our current production scenarios.  Recommended solution is that all relevant backend timeouts (not just explicit CF keepalive timeouts) must be larger than the ELB’s idle timeout.

Ref: https://sigopt.com/blog/the-case-of-the-mysterious-aws-elb-504-errors/

AWS PrivateLink S3

AWS PrivateLink provides private connectivity between VPCs, AWS services, and your on-premises networks, without exposing your traffic to the public internet. AWS PrivateLink makes it easy to connect services across different accounts and VPCs to significantly simplify your network architecture.

Now, Amazon S3 supports AWS PrivateLink, providing direct access to S3 via a private endpoint within your virtual private network. Simplify your network architecture by connecting to S3 from on-premises or in AWS using private IP addresses in your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), eliminating the need to use public IPs, configure firewall rules, or configure an Internet Gateway to access S3 from on-premises.

AWS Transfer Family

AWS Transfer Family provides fully managed Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP), File Transfer Protocol (FTP) over TLS, and FTP support for Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), enabling you to seamlessly migrate your file transfer workflows to AWS.

Last month, AWS announced the file transfer support to Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) file systems as well as Amazon S3. This feature enables you to easily and securely provide your business partners access to files stored in Amazon EFS file systems. With this launch, you now have the option to store the transferred files in a fully managed file system and reduce your operational burden, while preserving your existing workflows that use SFTP, FTPS, or FTP protocols.

When Amazon EFS is selected as the data store for your AWS Transfer Family server, the transferred files are readily available to your business-critical applications running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), as well as to containerized and serverless applications run using AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), AWS Fargate, and AWS Lambda. 

Happy Cloud-ing !