AWS Link Schmorgasboard
This is a compilation of links I (rICh morrow) have found in my travels. I share this with students of the AWS courses I teach with Global Knowledge and other training providers.
DISCLAIMER: This document is not a part of any official AWS Certified Training.
Please contact me at rich@quicloud.com if there's anything you'd like to add or change (eg: broken or out of date links).
Happy Hacking!
-r
Helpful Class Links
Student Errata
My GK page direct link
MyGK Setup
MyGK Course Prep
Bookshelf App Download direct link (use to view your Gilmore materials offline)
AWS Certification
Amazon's entry page to all certifications
CloudAcademy (great test-your-knowledge questions for exam prep)
Good info on general best practices for tests of any type
Global Knowledge Assets
MyGK Setup
GK Blog
GK Professional Edge (over 40 short courses, white papers, etc)
Global Knowledge Tech Support (TechSupport@globalknowledge.com)
https://blogs.aws.amazon.com/application-management/post/Tx1T9JYQOS8AB9I/Use-Nested-Stacks-to-Create-Reusable-Templates-and-Support-R
Global Knowledge 2017 Salary Survey (AWS Solutions Architect [Associate] Certification clocks in at #3 with starting salary of about $125K)
Rich Morrow Assets
Rich's LinkedIn page (TONS of great articles in there)
Quicloud.com -- available for consulting (writing, speaking, training, development, operations, advisement)
"Training Opportunities" talk from re:Invent 2016 (great history of AWS training, GK, and rich's involvement)
Link to all of Rich's classes on O'Reilly
Getting up to speed on General AWS
"Nine must-view AWS presentations"
AWS Free Usage Tier
Security Center
Service Documentation
AWS SlideShare page Insanely useful, frequently updated palette of slides
Harish Ganesan's Blog (great practical info)
FREE AWS Kindle books
AWS Masterclass series
AWS in Plain English
AWS Unified CLI (your #1 tool for interacting with AWS)
aws-shell utility Tab complete for AWS commands
Using Putty in the lab (Note: customers on Windows can also use Git BASH, or in Win10, use the Ubuntu shell)
Keeping up to speed on AWS
"What's New" page
AWS Blog by Jeff Barr
AWS Podcasts
AWS YouTube Channel
AWS Term Glossary
Services
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Cloud Formation
Visual Ops (lets you create CF templates from Arch diagrams
CloudFormation Template Libraries 2-300 pre-packaged CF Templates -- can be a great way to either get your hands dirty with a particular piece of software, or stand up an AWS service & start playing with it, already configured
CloudFormation::Init Docs
Cliqr -- visualization tool to create CF templates from Arch diagrams
2nd Watch (atlas & insight) -- products to help you with billing & cloudformation
List of services supported in Cloudformation
JSON (CF template) validator -- good for use in the labs
How to use Nested Stacks (modularize your templates)
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Cloud Front
CF Access Logs
Great intro tutorial on setting up and using a CloudFront distribution
GigaOM paper comparing CloudFront to Akamai
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CloudSearch / Elasticsearch
Probably start using Elasticsearch instead
Great intro tutorial on setting up and using a CloudSearch domain
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Cloud Trail
CloudTrail docs Audit logging tool for things like IAM
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Cloud Watch
Publishing Custom Metrics
Perl Monitorin Scripts for Custom Metrics
Stackdriver integration (cool cloudwatch dashboard)
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Data Pipeline
Data Pipeline intro video (re:Invent 2012 video)
Data Pipeline Service Docs
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Direct Connect
Direct Connect Partners
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DynamoDB
DynamoDB content import/export tutorial
Under the covers of DynamoDB (re:Invent 2012 video)
Nice blog post about 'autoscaling' DynamoDB
DynamoDB transactions across tables (Transaction Library)
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EC2
AWS Spot Blocks
Amazon EC2 Instance Types
ec2instances.info -- Better way to view the instance types
EC2 Masterclass (Ryan Shuttleworth)
AWS Marketplace (deployable VMs)
Pricing explanation of On-Demand, Reserved, Spot (part of rICh's 5 hr AWS course at http://bit.ly/learn-aws)
Modifying EC2 Reservations
OSv: Lightweight Cloud OS
SO post about how to make User-Data run on every boot of server
Advanced (Layer 2) networking with EC2 & Ravello
How adding ENIs can *moderately* affect throughput from the instance
The MSRs of EC2 (getting processor-level info on instances)
How EC2 Roles are protected (In other words -- can a developer just launch an instance into any role, then SSH into that instance & inherit some privileges that they don't normally have?) Answer: Yes, but they need they need to be granted the *ability* to use a role (assigned via "iam:PassRole" permission in the users PD)
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Elastic Beanstalk
Using Git for deployments
EB Tutorial
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Elastic Map Reduce
Rich's 16 hour Spark / Hadoop O'Reilly Course Many videos free for preview
Features of Hive in EMR
What is EMR?
Using EMR with VPC
rIChs 8 hour Hadoop course Many videos free for preview
EMR Deck from the Hadoop course mentioned above
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IAM
"Identity Broker" Sample app in C#
SAML integration to IAM
3rd Party Identity Federation (using OpenID)
Cross account service/resource sharing
AWS Security Blog (great info on auditing, etc)
Options for IAM virtual devices
Managing SSL/TLS with IAM
Tasks that require root account
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Kinesis
Kinesis Deep Dive (re:Invent 2014 talk by Adi Krishnan)
When should one use Kinesis vs SQS?
Kafka vs. Kinesis vs. SQS
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OpsWorks
OpsWorks Overview
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Redshift
Rich's 5 hr O'Reilly Redshift Course Many videos free for preview
Redshift Spectrum feature walkthrough
Loading RDS data into Redshift
30 min overview video from re:Invent 2013
How Pinterest uses Redshift
Airbnb talks abou Redshift Performance and Cost
Great Redshift tutorial (walks through set up, data load & query)
Comparison of Redshift to Google's BigQuery
Great LinkedIn discussion on "what makes Redshift unique"
In-depth, very detailed analysis of Redshift
Introduction to Redshift paper (by rICh)
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RDS
Oracle in AWS FAQ
Importing / Exporting Oracle Databases
Aurora on RDS blog post by Chris Littlefield
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SES
SimplerSES (Wrapper around SES)
SES Best Practices
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Storage Gateway
Storage Gateway impacts on TCO (30 min video from re:Invent 2013)
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S3
Maximizing S3 Performance (stellar video by Craig Carl)
Restrictions on Bucket Names
s3cmd (better than the native CLI for S3)
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Lambda
Build a Serverless Webserver w/Lambda (Sep, 2018 Webinar)
Lambda demo (article)
CloudFormation template for that Lambda demo
Lambda Limits
AWS' plan for their event-driven architectures
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VPC
VPN NAT Gateway
Jon Gallagher's *excellent* 2 hr VPC course Many videos free for preview
Difference between Security Groups & NACLs in the VPC
CIDR Wikipedia entry
Subnet Wikipedia Entry
VPC Subnet Docs
Route Table Wikipedia entry
VPC Route Table Docs
VPC DHCP Docs
VPC Security Overview
Dedicated Instances in the VPC
VPC Connectivity options
NAT instance HA with Squid Proxy
MPLS Explained
6 min info-rich MPLS CBT Micro Nugget
What services can we launch in the VPC?
Backup and Disaster Recovery
DR Whitepaper
Whitepapers / Case Studies
CloudDesignPattern.org - good patterns for various AWS use cases
White Papers
Architecture Center
Architecture Icon sets
AWS Security Process
AWS Solutions Case Studies
AWS DDM Studies (play by play app builds & optimizations)
Microsoft SharePoint reference architecture
Pricing Calculators
Online Pricing Calculator
TCO Comparison Calculator
Global Infrastructure
AWS Regions, Availability Zones, and Edge Locations Prezi
AWS Video Course
rICh's 5 hour AWS course for just $50 Many videos free for preview
Visual Cloud Management Tools
Visual Ops (lets you create CF templates from Arch diagrams
Alternate Consoles
Elastic Wolf
AWS Toolkit for Eclipse
Use Cases / Add Ons
Netflix Open Source Software (OSS) Center
Support
Amazon Web Services Support
Trusted Advisor
Outages
Analysis of recent AWS outages
Google Cloud Storage bug (catastrophic)
AWS vs Private Datacenters
GigaOM webinar comparing when / where to use your own Datacenter
How AWS came into being
The Everything Store by Brad Stone -- fascinating look at the people & history of Amazon.com & AWS
AWS Andy Jassy @ Harvard - the AWS story
Bezos' "Big Mandate"
Fascinating look under the covers from an Ex AWS engineer
Big Data / Hadoop
Global Knowledge Course catalog for Cloudera Certified Training
Compendium of links for Global Knowledge's Cloudera Classes
New Spark interface (Beta) for HUE
Intro to Spark webinar by Sujee Maniyam
What the @&^$ is NoSQL, exactly?
NoSQL Distilled (Distilled)
PaaS solutions / making your apps cloud agnostic
OutSystems is a great way to build, deploy and manage your apps across multiple cloud providers
WSO2 -- "lean enterprise middleware"
Rogue Wave is a cross-platform set of software dev tools which also performs both static & dynamic code verification
Workboard is a tool for collaborative, distributed development
Apache Stratos -- an Open PaaS framework
Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD)
WSO2 -- "lean enterprise middleware"
CloudBees
Docker & Containerization (LXC)
Contaiers & the evolution of the Cloud
Security & Compliance
AWS Compliance docs
Department of Defense Cloud Security Model
Decent list of some Penetration Testing toolkits
US Gov Cloud Differences
Hacker puts hosting firm out of business (lesson on key management & rotation)
"nine killer AWS Security Presentations"
AWS Class Assets
Architecture v5.0 Class Assets
AWS Well Architected Framework whitepaper
Architecting for the Cloud (AWS Best Practices) whitepaper
Advanced Architecture Class Assets
Black Belt Networking for the Cloud Ninja (Steve Morad @ AWS)
Performance Tuning Amazon EC2 Instances (Brendan Gregg @ Netflix)
Building a DDOS-resilient Architecture with AWS (Andrew Kiggins)
Deck and labs errata
Autoscaled NAT HA
Another take on NAT instance HA
Direct Connect Demo
Data Pipeline Demo
BGP Basics
ASN Basics
Networking Deep Dive (re:Invent video)
Best practices for migrating from RDS to DynamoDB whitepaper
AWS case study:Dash
Donut Caching (mmm... donuts)
Blue/Green Deployments
Gaming DevOps with Scopely (re:Invent video)
Tomcat Session state manager for DynamoDB
Setting JVM TTL for DNS record caching
Scaling vs Cost at Electronic Arts (re:Invent video)
7 layer OSI model
IPViking
Digital Attack Map
Circuit Breaker pattern
Stability patterns & anti-patterns
Extreme availability for mission-critical apps (re:Invent video)
Fault injection and service reliability (re:Invent video)
10 ways to avoid costly PCI compliance violations
Navigating PCI compliance in the cloud (re:Invent video)
PCI compliance FAQs
AWS Case Study: Cognia (PCI compliance)
Understanding hash functions & keeping passwords safe
MD5 hash tutorial
SHA1 hash tutorial
GCM and GMAC authenticated encryption algorithms
Securing data at rest with encryption
AWS: Overview of security processes
Free coursera course on cryptography
Moving big data in the cloud with Tsunami UDP
AWS Infrastructure behind the Obama for America Campaign
AWS Case study: Obama for America Campaign
Lab #3 instructions
Final Group project (choose one)
SavePaperSuite (content mgmt)
ShopAtGoGreen System workflow (SOA)
GoGreenGaming (gaming)
GoGreenAnalytics (big data)
Student Q+A
System Operations Class Assets
Student Errata
Advanced Ops Class Assets
Lab #1 Challenge exercise sample code (http://bit.ly/adv-ops-lab-1)
Kobi Biton Assets (https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/kbitpub/courses/advops/advops-student.html)
# gem installs v1 of the SDK (which uses AWS:: rather than v2 which uses Aws:: calls). The V2 that's installed results in "uninitialized constant AWS" errors.
# perl pie does search+replace of "aws-sdk" with "aws-sdk-v1"
gem install aws-sdk-v1
perl -p -i -e 's/aws-sdk/aws-sdk-v1/' `find . -type f -name '*.rb'`
4.15.1:
export AMM_LOG_JOBFLOW=`aws emr create-cluster --visible-to-all-users --instance-count 1 --instance-type m1.large --ami-version 2.3 --applications Name=Hive --ec2-attributes KeyName=$AMM_KEY_NAME --no-auto-terminate --output text | cut -d ' ' -f 2`
4.15.3 (have your users scp their qwiklabXXX.pem file up to the operations instance, then):
aws emr ssh --cluster-id $AMM_LOG_JOBFLOW --key-pair-file [path to your local private 'qwiklabXXX.pem' file]
Developing on AWS Class Assets / Notes
Identity Federation Slides
Link to download Visual Studio (choose "Enterprise Trial")
Java 7 SDK download (choose appropriate platform for "Java SE Development Kit 7u67")
Eclipse Kepler downloads (choose "Eclipse IDE for Java and DSL Developers")
Java SDK Docs API Reference
.NET SDK Docs API Reference
NOTE! When setting up Tomcat on the Mac to run locally (lab 5.1), Mac users may need to install the JST plugin in order to "Run on Server". In Eclipse, go to "Help"->"Install new software"->pick "Kepler"->type in "JST". You'll have to install the server adapters & server adapter extensions.
YouTube vid of installing Tomcat 7 on OSX
Lab 4.1 IAM policy
{
"Statement": [
{
"Action": [
"sts:AssumeRole"
],
"Effect": "Allow",
"Resource": "*"
}
]
}
Big Data Assets/Notes
Big Data Test Drive (SAS, Tableau and other solutions -- all available for free trial)
Deep Learning Assets/Notes
Siraj's "Comparison of ML Frameworks" Remember Siraj, watch his videos, worship him! The HAIR!!!
TensorFlow Playground Lets you visualize the data and flow through a NN.
Guide to Understanding Convolutional Neural Networks
EXCELLENT description of NNs with no math! Part of a multi-part series on NNs from a guy who is stellar at relaying complex info
Overview of Convolutional Networks
Overview of Activation Functions
Walthrough of Pooling Layers Part of an excellent data science course taught by Andrew Ng at Coursera.
C2S / GovCloud
Rapid prototyping
C2S: What's next
GovCloud deep dive into compliance
All Classes
Why you should "read ahead" in the labs
Bookshelf App Download direct link (use to view your Gilmore materials offline)
Qwiklab direct link
My GK page direct link
Alexa Commercial