How To: Reduce Cloud Bill in Half for Any Cloud Provider

“But you said, we would be only paying what we use then how come my Cloud bill is way more than my on-prem cost?”

Managements are now asking above question from Cloud Operations team all across the globe as recession looms, revenues drop, businesses almost to a standstill, budgets shrunk and economic outlook becoming grimmer by the day.

Basic DynamoDB Data Modelling

The key differentiator between a NoSQL database like AWS Dynamodb and a relational database like Oracle is of the way data is modelled. In a relational model; data is normalized, de-duplicated and relationships are established between entities. In a NoSQL database like Dynamodb, data can be duplicated and entities can be fused together. This is done to facilitate scalability which is hallmark of today's hyper-scale cloud based applications.

Why on Earth Would You Manage Your Own Kubernetes Control Plane?

The word Kubernetes comes from the Greek word 'Helmsman'. A helmsman is the person who navigates the ship ensuring the steady and desired course. Whether the seas are turbulent or not, or if some component of ship fails, or the load of containers on ship needs to be re-balanced; its the job of Helmsman or Kubernetes to make sure ship maintains its desired state until it reaches its destination.

What is Nomos in Anthos?

In kubernetes, everything is a code. For code, the best place to reside is any git repository which should act as single source of truth. GCP Anthos enables us to extend the power of kubernetes to multi and hybrid clouds. With this power comes the added complexity of managing multiple kubernetes clusters scattered in GKE, or in GKE on-prem or in other cloud providers.

Anthos is Icing on GKE Cake

If you have installed and managed all of Kubernetes by yourself, then you can appreciate how relieving it is to handover control plane and node component to services like GKE, AKS and EKS or any similar managed kubernetes service.

Rename SQL Server Database in AWS RDS

In AWS RDS based SQL Server, you cannot rename a database from SQL Server management studio. You will get an error about permissions. You need to use rdsadmin command to accomplish that.

RDS Resource in Terraform

Just marveling again how easy and clean it is to create an RDS resource in Terraform.

# Create the RDS instance

resource "aws_db_instance" "databaseterra" {

  allocated_storage    = "${var.database_size}"

  engine               = "${var.DbEngineType}"

  engine_version       = "${var.DbMajorEngineVersion}"

  instance_class       = "${var.DBInstanceClass}"

  identifier             = "testdbterra"

  username             = "${var.database_user}"

  password             = "${var.database_password}"

  db_subnet_group_name = "${aws_db_subnet_group.rdssubnetgroupterra.id}"

  parameter_group_name = "${aws_db_parameter_group.rdsparametergroupterra.id}"

  multi_az           = "${var.db_multiaz}"

  vpc_security_group_ids = ["${aws_security_group.RdsSecurityGroupterra.id}"]

  publicly_accessible    = "false"

  backup_retention_period = "2"

  license_model           = "license-included"

  apply_immediately = "true"

  tags = {

    Env = "Non-Prod"

  }

Just have your vars ready and thats it.

Use Conda to Generate Requirements.txt for Docker Containers

pip is a standard package manager. Requirements.txt can be generated in one environment and installed by pip in a new environment. Conda replicates own installation. Pip produces a list of packages that were installed on top of standard library to make the package you wrote work.

Following are the steps to generate requirements.txt file to be used insdie Dockerfile for docker containers:

Urdu in AWS

Urdu is arguably one of the most beautiful and poetic language on the planet. AWS Translate now supports Urdu along with 31 other languages, which is awesome.

How to do a quick health check of AWS RDS database

Just because the database is on AWS RDS, it doesn't mean that it won't run slow or get stuck. So when your users complain about the slowness of your RDS database, do the following quick health check: