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Joining a Linux EC2 instance to Active Directory realm

This post is not too AWS-specific, in fact the steps below should work not only on Amazon Linux but also on RedHat Linux, CentOS and Oracle Linux and posibly on Debian and Ubuntu based distros as well. There is a number of prerequisities for a successful completion of this task. At least the following records should be [...]

By |June 6th, 2017|Best Practice|9 Comments

S3 Pre-signed URL example

S3 Pre-signed URLs can be used to provide a temporary 3rd party access to private objects in S3 buckets. For example non-public files on a file sharing site can only be made available to the approved users with one-off URLs that expire after 10 minutes. Here we offer a simple demo for testing the concept. The demo consists of [...]

By |January 25th, 2017|Best Practice|7 Comments

Re-using EC2 Key Pair in multiple regions

One of the parameters required for launching an EC2 instance is a Key Pair which is effectively an SSH Key used for interactive logging into the default user account - on Amazon Linux it's the ec-user account - or for decrypting the Windows Administrator's password. It is easy to create a new Key Pair / [...]

By |July 4th, 2016|Best Practice|2 Comments

Using LastPass with AWS Console

As an Amazon Web Services professional working on projects for multiple customers I need an easy way to login to their many AWS accounts through the web console. Since I use LastPass for storing my website passwords it's only logical to use it for AWS logins as well. The problem is that there are 3 [...]

By |January 17th, 2016|Best Practice|2 Comments

EC2 Instance Roles

In the previous post about Access & Secret Keys I emphasized that those keys - static keys - should never be used in production and in fact they should never leave your laptop. But what if you need to call the AWS services from scripts or programs running on an EC2 instance? In a typical [...]

By |November 27th, 2015|Best Practice|0 Comments

Access & Secret Keys

When working with AWS API the clients (programs, scripts, etc) must have a way to prove who they are and what level of access to Amazon services they should have. In a typical scenario an AWS user runs aws cli (or a script using aws cli) to interact with Amazon. For example to create a [...]

By |July 22nd, 2015|Best Practice|2 Comments