Category Archives: AWS

AWS CloudFormation EC2 Win AD servers

Task

  1. EC2 instances must be automatically added to Active Directory (AD) on provisioning and removed form AD on termination
  2. Each EC2 instance must have 3 private IP addresses (required for MS SQL Always-On) assigned by DHCP
  3. NLB must be used to expose MS SQL Always-On Listener because it’s faster than changing CNAME value
  4. Dedicated ASG to keep each instance fault tolerant
  5. Dedicated data disks which are re-attached to new instance in ASG with the same disk letters

Solution

https://github.com/kagarlickij/aws-cloudformation-ec2-win-ad-servers

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Cloud agnostic approach with Terraform

If you’ve been working with both AWS and Azure you should have noticed that each of them has some advantages.

Tools like Terraform might be very helpful if you’re not familiar with both CloudFormation and Azure RM.

However don’t consider Terraform as a nonpareil (this is not true at all), it is simple tool for simple tasks.

So in this  post I’ll tell you about Terraform terms and concepts and show example with AWS & Azure.

For a bit more complicated infrastructure you’ll have to use CloudFormation and Azure RM

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Install single tableau server in custom AWS VPC

If you interested in Tableau installation on AWS you should have a look at CloudFormation templates from Tableau.

Single server installation suits well for trial, but it has a number of limitations including link to default VPC. But what if you want to deploy it in dedicated VPC or you don’t have default one?

Not a big deal, I’ve updated template and you can use it:

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Install Microsoft sqlcmd command-line tools on AWS Linux

If you have MS SQL server in your environment and have to do some actions (execute migrations, change data, etc.) with it during your CI/CD it might be quite inconvenient to use Windows machine.

Fortunately we have sqlcmd for Linux, and Microsoft provides some instructions for popular Linux distributions – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/linux/sql-server-linux-setup-tools

But what if you have AWS Linux? If you try to use instructions from MS you will fail and there’s not much information across the Internet about this topic. The only useful link is here.

Since my env is highly automated I decided to create simple script to install sqlcmd on AWS Linux and share it with you:

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Vagrant with AWS and PyCharm / Visual Studio Code

Vagrant is awesome tool for creating and sharing environments running in VirtualBox, Vmware, Hyper-V, etc.
But nowadays we may need to run AWS Linux as well as CentOS, Ubuntu and Windows.

Powerful IDEs such as PyCharm can wok with Vagrant machines, which is really useful, e.g. while debugging scripts.

So in this post I’ll show you how to do it.

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