Understanding Nested Lists Dictionaries of JSON in Python and AWS CLI

After lots of hair pulling, bouts of frustration, I was able to grasp this nested list and dictionary thingie in JSON output of AWS cli commands such as describe-db-instances and others. If you run the describe-db-instances for rds or describe-instances for ec2, you get a huge pile of JSON mumbo-jumpo with all those curly and square brackets studded with colons and commas. The output is heavily nested.

AWS CloudFormation Linter Installation and Quick Introduction

AWS Cloudformation is an evolving managed service which facilitates infrastructure as a code in the cloud. What it means is that you can create AWS resources like EC2 instances, S3 buckets and many more just by writing code instead of using GUI console.

Step by Step Troubleshooting and Validation of AWS CloudFormation Yaml template

CloudFormation (CFN) is infrastructure as a code service of AWS. You just tell CFN your desired state of resources and it creates them in order while resolving dependencies. You mention these resources in a file called as template which can be written in YAML or JSON. YAML being bit more user readable, is widely used now. YAML is great but you have to be aware of its indentation.

When AWS SCT Unable to Connect to MySQL in RDS or EC2

AWS Schema Conversion Tool (SCT) is one of the must tool for a successful migration of databases to AWS RDS.

If you are trying to connect to MySQL hosted on EC2 instance or RDS and unable to make the connection despite of setting the security groups correctly and making sure that port, hostname, username and password are right, then first check the log of SCT.

Monitoring Database in AWS Aurora After Migrating from Oracle to PostgreSQL

Suppose you have an Oracle database on-premise, which you have now moved over to AWS Cloud in AWS Aurora PostgreSQL. 

AWS Support Knowledge Center

In addition to AWS documentation and blogs, one of the best resource is AWS Knowledge Center. It contains frequently asked questions from AWS customers so this resource contains real world problems with their solution.

Updating Oracle Opatch with AWS Systems Manager Run Command at Scale

AWS Systems Manager (SSM) is a managed service by AWS, which is used to configure and manage EC2 instances, other AWS resources, and on-premise VMs/servers at scale. SSM frees you up from having ssh or bastion host access to the remote resources.

awk -F option

I often need to extract subset of data from one command so that it could be used in another during the DBA tasks performed through shell scripts.

One such requirement is that when you need to feed the name of ASM disks to the querydisks command.

Step by Step Installation of PostgreSQL 11 on Oracle Linux 7

This is quick spit-out of commands, I used on my test virtual machine to install PostgreSQL 11 on Oracle Enterprise Linux 7.

Quickly Download Oracle Software From My Oracle Support

In order to quickly download Oracle software from My Oracle Support (MOS) to your server or local host, you must have curl or wget installed.

Check these by using:

[oracle@test working]$ which curl
/usr/bin/curl
[oracle@test working]$ which wget
/usr/bin/wget