DEV Community: Danilo Costa

AWS - Well-architected framework and I.A.M in practice

Danilo Costa — Fri, 05 Jul 2024 18:32:28 +0000

"Today is gonna be the day that they're gonna throw it back to you" - lazy song for hipsters

So in the last post we learned about how to make an AWS account and the basic topics behind an AWS organization, today we're going to learn about:

How to make organizations in practice
How to create new users
AWS Well-Architected framework

But before we start...
It's necessary to say, that if you're using a free account you do not have technical support, this kind of support is only available for paid accounts, so please, take care because not in that tutorial but in the next tutorials we're going to see some content that involves some values.

How to make Organizations and Users in Practice!

Okay so to deal with organizations we need to take care of two Amazon services, the first is "AWWS Organizations" (Duuhhh), and the second is "I.A.M".

The first one you can access by searching for "AWS Organizations":

On this page, you can create new AWS accounts and associate them with the root account (or your account). Ofc you also can divide it into groups, but in my personal opinion, it's better to do that by using the I.A.M.

To access I.A.M just search for IAM in the search bar:

in the I.A.M section, we also can make new users, but first, it's necessary to create it in the previous section. After that you can make new Users and divide them into groups, inside each group we're able to select some permissions (or policies) for each user.

But beyond that, we also can add some individual policies for individual users.

A little bit more about I.A.M

It's a good practice to create a second account with Administrator Access, the reason for that it's because the root account should only care about billing and managing other users.
For each user, gives 2 kinds of permission, "full permission to something" and "Read-only permission to something", the reason for that it's because when someone does something wrong, instead of revoking access, you can just revoke permissions until the problem is solved.
Each user should have MFA for security.

AWS Well-Architected Framework and Why We Should Divide Our Users

When it comes to taking care of an entire organization it's normal to have some headaches, and it's not necessary to be a BIG TECH, even small companies with AWS can suffer by not organizing correctly the cloud section. Because of that inside AWS, we have a Quiz called AWS Well-Architected Framework, and in simple words, this questionnaire asks questions about the tech health of your company inside of AWS. At this moment it's good to know about the existence of this framework, but do not answer it now! Wait for when we finally use it to do some deployment.

AWS Foundation - Root Account, I.A.M and how to not get a $500 Bill

Danilo Costa — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 14:29:49 +0000

"Sooooooooooo Jimmy Boy Here we are!!!!""- Gary

Today we're gonna talk about the base of everything that we need to use AWS: An Account! Maybe that's the part that most beginners fear because it's when we make an AWS account, and everybody is afraid to get a bill of something like USD 500,00 in one day to another.

Btw, to get easier it's necessary to split this subject into topics:

What's a Root Account and why does it seem like the "King" in a chess game
What are organizational units, accounts, and I.A.M (a brief look)
How to make your AWS account

What's a Root Account and why does it seem like the "King" in a chess game

Okay, maybe some people would say that's better to start by creating an AWS account, but NO! Before anything, it's necessary to understand some concepts about accounts in general.

The primary account that somebody (or some company) would have it's the "Root Account". This account has the power to do ANYTHING, but it's terrible to leave such responsibility to a single account for many reasons.

Imagine that we have a Team made of 10 people:

three guys use the account to deploy web apps
three other guys use the account only to check some data logs
Finally, the last four guys use the account to check the DynamoDB (or the no-SQL Amazon database).

Okay, everything is fine until one day one guy decides to delete an entire column from the database, can you guess who did it? No, you cannot, because who did it isn't from the team, the guy who did it it's just the company CEO who has full access to the root account, and one day because of some customer he decided to use the root account to verify a problem but he knows nothing about DataBases and just f*cked up everything.

The only responsibility that a Root should have is to create other accounts and pay the bills, everything beyond that is not recommended.

What are organizational units and accounts (a brief look)

So as I said before, the only responsibility that a root account should have it's to create other accounts, a good practice to organize it is by creating "Organizational Units" or just "O.U", don't worry, in the next post you will learn how to create both root account and organizational units, at this moment try to focus only in the fact that's possible to create a kind of "categories" for our accounts on AWS.

But why organizational units?
AWS is not just a "cloud" but a bunch of many services for many purposes. We could host a website, or a server, run LLM process, mine some Bitcoin, use it as a Database and the list goes on...

Because of that, it's common to see in many companies a team divided by "categories" inside of AWS. Usually, the web developer can only access the Staging server, the QA can access the staging and production servers. That's just a few examples.

Each organization unit has a product called "I.A.M" (Identity and Access Management), inside of this service the Root manager can give permissions to each organization unit. For example, someone from the development team usually has permission to access Amazon services like EC2, Elastic Beanstalk, and DynamoDB, but someday a junior developer joined the team and the Root manager thought that it was better to not give him anything except access to Elastic Beanstalk, so he created an organization unit for entry-level developers and the only permission that they have it's to access ElasticBeanstalk!

Okay, we talked about Root Account, O.U., and I.A.M, but only in concepts, it's time to put your hands on the work!

How to make your AWS account!

Go to aws.amazon.com and click on "Sign In to the Console"

Now click on "Create a new AWS account"

Proceed with every step because everything is like making an account on any other website. They will ask you about your address and your E-mail, and they'll ask if you wish to use your account for business or personal use. After all those steps, you'll reach the following form:

Every newbie got afraid only by looking at this screen. But be patient my boy! I'm gonna tell you a little secret:
For an entire year, a free account has 750 hours per month to use as you wish! But after one year of using it, they'll charge your credit card. But here we're all students and even if we use something from this 750 hours, it's gonna be the cheapest possible. So do not get afraid of adding your credit card at this point.

In the next post we're gonna see how to create organizational units and delegate permissions to every user, I hope you like it.

AWS - A brief introduction

Danilo Costa — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 20:51:41 +0000

Okay, everybody knows that "DevOps" is the new "thing" in the IT area, the reason for that is mainly because of the huge popularity of many cloud providers, and that popularity has a good reason:

Nobody wants anymore to host an entire data center inside of a company building, okay maybe you could see some companies doing that like Cipsoft (the company behind Tibia) as they showed us when Tibia did 25 years:

But the truth is, if wanna build a new software from scratch, it's a bad idea to do that using a data center in nowadays. The first guy to notice it as a way to offer "cloud as a service" is Jeff Bezos. Okay, maybe we have other people and other companies that have done it before, but Bezos was the guy who started it on a huge scale, only after him did we get other companies doing it with more effort like Microsoft or Google.

So... What are the advantages of using AWS?

First we've the agility! Noticing that you don't need anymore to take care of a physical data center, you get more time to care about the logic and configuration of your server
Second we've "Security", but that's a sensible topic. Before anything, it's necessary to say that AWS is not 100% secure, the reason for that is because the security of your app starts with your app! If there's any blind spot in your code, it doesn't matter if you're using AWS or any other provider.
We've scalability, but that topic is a double-edged sword. Once Uncle Bob said that a company could close its doors because of a bad code, but nobody paid much attention to that because it sounded like something from another world. But I've seen it with my own eyes, A company that I worked before closed its doors because of a bad code base, everybody tried to advise the CEO about it but he didn't care until he could not pay AWS anymore... On the other hand, I worked for a company that had a huge base of users and a large quantity of requests per day, and I'll not say numbers but I swear, only because of the code quality, they're paying less than the first company I said.

But pay attention to Scalability!

When you make a new AWS account, you have for free a total of 750 hours per month of EC2 instances (EC2 is like "Amazon virtual computers", I'll talk more about it in the next post). And also you've it for an entire year! FOR FREE! But when we're talking about real applications it's normal to notice that 750hours per month isn't so much. And if your app is used for more hours, the more you pay for using a cloud service. That's the reason why big tech companies are still using their own data centers. And that's also the reason why you need to add a better user experience and a good code base to your app, to avoid problems with it!

That's all for today guys, I'm writing an entire series of posts to teach everybody everything I know about AWS, and that's the Beginning!

How to use Binding Pry with a docker container

Danilo Costa — Fri, 25 Aug 2023 14:37:07 +0000

Hello fellas, today we're gonna solve an old noob problem, how to use Pry inside of a docker container?

It's simple, first you just need to add these two flags inside of your dockercompose file
app: stdin_open: true tty: true

Now, run your docker project with:
docker-compose up -d && docker attach $(docker-compose ps -q app)

And it's done