Archive

Ec2

Using SSM Session Manager for interactive instance access

You may argue that interactive login to EC2 instances should never be needed. Everything is dynamic, automated, self healing, centrally logged, and so on and there is no place for human interaction, right? But lets be honest – the world isn’t perfect and we all sometimes need to jump into bash to do stuff for […]

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New C5 / M5 / T3 instance disk names

When we started using the new C5, M5 or T3-class instances (e.g. t3.micro, m5.large, m5d.large, c5.xlarge, etc) we noticed that the disk device names are no longer the classic /dev/sda1 or /dev/xvda that we were used to for years. Now that the disk names in the OS are no longer the names shown in the […]

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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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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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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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