Author: Marcus Bastian

Your Cloud and Infrastructure-as-Code Expert.

Clouductivity - PostgreSQL Monitoring with Datadog

PostgreSQL Monitoring with Datadog

If you’ve managed PostgreSQL databases in the past, you know how important it is to have proper monitoring in place for them. One bad query at the right volume or time of day can cascade into a plethora of issues. Such a query could cause crippling CPU utilization on your database server or result in…
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Clouductivity - Tips for Getting AWS Solutions Architect Professional Certified

Tips for Getting AWS Solutions Architect Professional Certified

Not too long ago, I was searching for information on the AWS Solutions Architect Professional certification exam. I was trying to find out how I might best prepare myself for the exam. Of course, there were plenty of paid courses out there and some of the content through Pluralsight was useful, but I quickly realized…
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Clouductivity - Scaling Postgres in AWS and Google Cloud

Scaling Postgres in AWS and Google Cloud

So you’ve launched a new application in production, and your applications are performing snappily as you might expect. The cloud is infinitely scalable, right? A few months or a year down the road, you start noticing seemingly random slowdowns for Postgres queries that normally execute quickly. CPU and memory utilization look fine, so you start…
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Running an ECS Task on Each Cluster Machine

Run a Task on Each ECS Cluster Node If you’re using Amazon ECS with tools such as Datadog or local log shippers, you’ve likely encountered the problem of needing to run an instance of a given container on each ECS cluster machine. Personally, I’ve needed to run a Datadog (DD-Agent) ECS task on each of…
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AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store

Implementing AWS Parameter Store

AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store In today’s technology, application security is receiving much more attention than ever before. With the multitude of data breaches and hacks occurring across the internet, it’s evident that securing our application credentials in an encrypted fashion is a must. In this article, I’d like to talk about the Systems Manager…
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AWS CloudWatch - Monitoring your Application

Monitoring Your Applications in AWS

Building out a sufficient monitoring suite is critical to measuring the performance and availability of your services. The best time to start thinking about monitoring your applications is before it goes to production. There are a plethora of different tools at your disposal in the AWS ecosystem to configure application monitoring and alerting. Where to…
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Jenkins CI CD Pipeline Job AWS Ansible Credentials

Accessing Secure Credentials in a Jenkins Pipeline

Accessing Credentials Stored in Jenkins Securely in a Pipeline Job For several months now, I’ve stopped creating Freestyle Jenkins jobs in favor of using Jenkins Pipeline to manage all of my CI/CD processes, for a number of reasons. One of the first things that I needed to figure out was how to securely access the…
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Choosing AWS Lambda VS Amazon ECS

When to Use AWS Lambda Functions VS Amazon ECS

To Lambda or Not to Lambda. That is the Question! Serverless architecture is the new craze in cloud world, with a myriad of serverless services across the various cloud platforms. The concept of not having to patch servers or manage systems security is incredibly appealing and the deployment process is fairly seamless. AWS Lambda is…
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AWS Credentials - IAM Access Keys and Secret Keys

Configuring AWS Credentials with Access Keys, Secret Keys, and IAM Roles

Configuring Access Keys, Secret Keys, and IAM Roles So you’re brand new to AWS and you’re looking to find out how you can use the AWS CLI or scripts to interact with AWS‘s APIs. It’s not nearly as difficult as it may seem, and you can get a workstation set up with AWS Credentials in…
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Amazon S3 Boto3 Uploads and Downloads

Downloading & Uploading Files in Amazon S3 using Python Boto3

Python – Download & Upload Files in Amazon S3 using Boto3 In this blog, we’re going to cover how you can use the Boto3 AWS SDK (software development kit) to download and upload objects to and from your Amazon S3 buckets. For those of you that aren’t familiar with Boto, it’s the primary Python SDK…
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