Updating AWS Managed Prefix Lists

I was working with a customer the other day trying to come up with a way to import a bunch of IP addresses into a white list on AWS. We came up with the approach of using Managed Prefix Lists in VPC. I wrote some Python in order to grab some code from an API… Continue reading Updating AWS Managed Prefix Lists

Automating Security Group Rule Removal

I’m using an Amazon Web Services Security Group as a way to allow traffic into an EC2 instance for the instance’s users. The users can give themselves access through a web interface that I wrote for them. Maybe I’ll cover that in a different post. I found recently that the Security Group was nearing its… Continue reading Automating Security Group Rule Removal

EC2 Reservation Notification

I realized today that I haven’t updated my EC2 reservations recently. Wondering why I never did this I came to understand that there was no way that I was getting notified that the reservations were expiring. I spent the day putting together a script that would look through my reservations, assess the time of their… Continue reading EC2 Reservation Notification

Pandas & NumPy with AWS Lambda

Fun fact: Pandas and NumPy don’t work out of the box with Lambda. The libraries that you might download from your development machine probably won’t work either. The standard Lambda Python environment is very barebones by default. There is no point in loading in a bunch of libraries if they aren’t needed. This is why… Continue reading Pandas & NumPy with AWS Lambda

Where Is It Five O’Clock Pt: 3

So I left this project at a point where I felt it needed to be re-architected based on the fact that Flask only executes the function once and not every time the page loads. I re-architected the application in my head to include an API that calls the Lambda function and returns a list of… Continue reading Where Is It Five O’Clock Pt: 3

Where Is It 5 O’Clock Pt: 2

So I spend the evening deploying this web application to Amazon Web Services. In my test environment, everything appeared to be working great because every time I reloaded the page it reloaded the function as well. When I transferred this over to a live environment I realized the Python function only ran every time I… Continue reading Where Is It 5 O’Clock Pt: 2

EC2 Action Slack Notification

I took a brief break from my Lambda function creation journey to go on vacation but, now i’m back! This function will notify a Slack channel of your choosing when an EC2 instance enters “Starting, Stopping, Stopped, or Shutting-Down” status. I thought this might be useful for instances that reside under a load balancer. It… Continue reading EC2 Action Slack Notification

Check EC2 Instance Tags on Launch

In my ever-growing quest to automate my AWS infrastructure deployments, I realized that just checking my tags wasn’t good enough. I should force myself to put tags in otherwise my instances won’t launch at all. I find this particularly useful because I utilize AWS Backup to do automated snapshots nightly of all of my instances.… Continue reading Check EC2 Instance Tags on Launch