AWS engineering notes

Land of Long White Amazon Cloud

Practical AWS projects, security patterns and operational lessons from New Zealand.

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 […]

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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 / […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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Michael Ludvig

Who am I? Michael Ludvig — Experienced IT Professional focused on Architecting, Designing and Implementation of Amazon Web Services solutions for customers of various sized and various AWS adoption levels. My background …

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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 …

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