DEV Community: Nkwenti Fon Nkwenti

AWS Community Builders - Christmas Edition

Nkwenti Fon Nkwenti — Thu, 22 Dec 2022 12:36:28 +0000

What surprises you most about the community builders program?

I was surprised when I was accepted into the AWS Community Builders program in June 2021 without any authentic professional experience. Plus, I am currently living and working in Cameroon. The program takes diversity seriously from day zero.

What’s your background and your experience with AWS?

I studied Management in the University but quickly switched to tech after I graduated. My tech journey started with certifications in the Networking space (Cisco, Juniper, Microsoft etc) and I eventually picked up a job at an ISP where I started as a NOC engineer, then I was Solutions Architect for about 8 years and finally Service Delivery Manager before I resigned. I got introduced to Cloud Computing by a friend back in 2018. In the course of researching and learning, I fell in love with AWS and decided to start the first user group in Douala, Cameroon in 2020. My initial interest was with AWS Networking technologies due to my professional background but I fell in love with Serverless in 2022 and landed a job with Serverless Guru as Serverless Developer in 2022.

What’s the biggest benefit you see from the program?

Networking and diversity. Living and working in a Country that doesn’t have an AWS region yet with most companies are still taking their first steps provides unique challenges. But thanks to the community, I’ve been exposed to best practices and ideas that I would have never come up with on my own.

What’s the next swag item that you would like to get?

Hoodies💯. It would be great if we could have stickers that show the date of joining or a number of years in the community for existing builders renewing their membership.

What are you eating for dinner today? Share the recipe!

Jollof Rice Kamer (Cameroon) style

½ pound meat
1 medium onion
1 tablespoon Chicken bouillon
1 tablespoon garlic salt
1 teaspoon paprika
2 tablespoon tomato paste
18-ounce canned tomatoes
3 cups water or stock
3 cups rice
1 pound of peas and carrots
Salt and pepper to taste

Is there anything else you would like to say about the community builders program in 2022?

I’m an advocate for diversity and this program is truly diverse. The Community Management Team does a fantastic job at communicating and responding to DMs. I would strongly advise anyone interested in AWS and Cloud to sign up and be part of one of the greatest tech communities in Cloud.

Getting Started with AWS CLI v2 as a Docker Container

Nkwenti Fon Nkwenti — Mon, 11 Oct 2021 17:53:58 +0000

AWS CLI is a command-line tool used to interact with, and manage AWS resources. Any task that calls the AWS APIs from the AWS Management Console can also be done from your terminal using the AWS CLI.

Using the CLI is powerful because repetitive tasks can be scripted and automated. For example, you can write a script to show you all the S3 buckets in your account instead of clicking multiple times in the console to get the same result each time.

The AWS CLI version 2 was released on February 10, 2020. It introduced many new features, including the option to install the AWS CLI as a Docker container. Docker is an open-source containerization platform that allows developers to package applications into containers.

Containers contain just the application and its dependencies, making them lightweight and portable across different operating systems.

The advantage of using Docker images is that they are universal and can be easily shared via the DockerHub. Containerization enables you to use the AWS CLI version 2 in a container-based environment without having to manage the installation and dependencies yourself, as was the case with the Python PIP installer for the AWS CLI v1.

What you will learn

In this blog post, we will look at the following;

How to download and run the AWS CLI v2 docker image
How to share host credentials for programmatic access to AWS
How to shorten the Docker command
How to update the AWS

Pre-requisites

An AWS account with an IAM user that has programmatic access.
An access key ID and secret access key for the IAM user. See how to create an IAM user here.
All commands are run on UNIX-based systems. If you are using windows, you can install the Windows system for Linux here to follow up.

Installing Docker

You must have Docker installed on your computer to be able to use AWS CLI v2 docker image. To install Docker, do the following:

If you are using macOS or Windows 10, go to www.docker.com/products/docker-desktop to download Docker Desktop. Chose a stable version and click on download.
Once the installer is downloaded, double-click on it to install Docker on your computer. The defaults are enough for this tutorial to succeed, so accept all of them.
If you are using a Linux distro like Ubuntu, you can follow the official Docker documentation here on how to install it on your computer.

When Docker has finished installing and is running, you should see the Docker's whale icon on your taskbar if you are using Windows. On macOS, the whale icon is on the menu bar near the clock.

To confirm if the Docker installation was successful, type the following command on your terminal;



➜  ~ docker version
Client: Docker Engine - Community
 Cloud integration: 1.0.9
 Version:           20.10.5
 API version:       1.41
 Go version:        go1.13.15
 Git commit:        55c4c88
 Built:             Tue Mar  2 20:13:00 2021
 OS/Arch:           darwin/amd64
 Context:           default
 Experimental:      true
---------

Version: 20.10.5 is proof that you are ready to go to the next step.

Download and run the AWS CLI v2 container.

The official AWS CLI version 2 Docker image is hosted on DockerHub in the amazon/aws-cli repository. Docker Hub is an online public repository for storing and sharing Docker images.

In order to install the AWS CLI on your local computer, you will need to use the docker run command.

When the docker run command is run for the first time, it will check the local cache on your computer for a copy of the AWS CLI, but it wouldn't find it there on the first run. By default, the next step will be to look for and download the image from Docker Hub online.



docker run --rm -it amazon/aws-cli --version

—rm flag is for clean up. Docker will automatically remove the file system when the container it exited. This

— it flag is for interactive. When the container is run with this flag, you get connected to the container's pseudo-TTY with stdin creating an interactive bash shell in the container. You can then input the commands to interact with your AWS environment.

—version flag executes a command to display the version of the AWS CLI.

The download will happen only once from DockerHub. Future docker run commands will run the container directly from a copy in the local docker image cache on your computer so you won't see any downloads. The capture below shows how the command gets executed directly.

Sharing host credentials.

A docker container provides isolation so by default, the CLI will not be able to access the file system on your computer. This means no direct access to configuration scripts and credentials.

In order to speed up your programmatic access via the AWS CLI Docker image, you will need to share your AWS credentials with the container.

It is a common practice to save frequently used configuration settings and credentials in files so as to always avoid retyping them each time you need them. In the case of the AWS CLI, it uses the settings found in the profile named default. You may still override this default behaviour and store your credentials and configurations elsewhere but for the purpose of this tutorial, we will use the default.

If you already have your AWS credentials stored on your local computer, you may skip this step and move straight to mounting the host system's directory to the container. But if you don't, you can save your save your credentials by using the aws configure command and passing the parameters of your secret access key ID and secrete access key



aws configure
AWS Access Key ID [None]: AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE
AWS Secret Access Key [None]: wJalrXUtnFEMI/K7MDENG/bPxRfiCYEXAMPLEKEY
Default region name [None]: us-west-2
Default output format [None]: json

The AWS CLI stores sensitive credential information (that you specify with aws configure command) **** in a local file named credentials, in a folder named .aws in your home directory.

In order to share the credentials on your host computer with the AWS CLI v2 Docker container, you will need to mount the host system's ~/.aws directory to the container's /root/.aws.



docker run --rm -it -v ~/.aws:/root/.aws amazon/aws-cli command

After the command is run, the AWS CLI version 2 running in the container will be able to locate the host file information.

Note that we added the -v flag (same as —volume) which is used to bind-mount the AWS credential file to the docker image.

Each time you run the AWS CLI v2 Docker image and mount the AWS credentials, you will be able to execute CLI commands with the permissions allowed for the IAM user.

There is no fun in having to type out such a long command. The good news is that you do not have to do so each time, which leads us to the next task in this tutorial, on how to shorten the Docker command.

Shortening the Docker command

Each time you want to run the AWS CLI docker container, you will practically use the same set of commands to run the container, with docker run, pass the -rm flag to remove the file system when the container is exited and -it to connect to the pseudo-TTY to run bash commands. The good news is that you can use alias' in Linux and macOS or doskey in Windows to avoid typing the same lines each time.



alias aws='docker run --rm -it amazon/aws-cli'

If you always access the host file system to run the AWS CLI with your AWS credentials then it even becomes more important to shorten the repetitive part of the command. The code snippet below shortens it into an alias aws.



alias aws='docker run --rm -it -v ~/.aws:/root/.aws -v $(pwd):/aws amazon/aws-cli'

To test the alias, we are going to simply check the version of the AWS CLI.



aws --version

You can run other AWS commands and receive the same outputs just like you did with the AWS CLI v1.



aws s3 ls

Updating the AWS CLIv2

By default, when we ran the aws cli docker image, it downloaded the latest image by default because we didn't specify tag a specific version. The latest image is always tagged latest. So when next the docker run command is used, only the existing image tagged latest in the cache will be used. Docker run looks first at the local cache for the image so because there is already an image tagged latest, it will not seek to download the latest image from DockerHub until we explicitly tell it to do so.

This is done by passing the latest tag for the image.



docker pull amazon/aws-cli:latest

Conclusion

Many companies are already invested into container-based deployment tools and workflows like Docker. So being able to execute the AWS CLI from a container benefits from the advantages of containers such as portability, isolation and also security. Other tools such as the AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) also make use of docker for testing applications locally. I personally do not use the AWS CLI v2 docker image in production but I am just experimenting with it. If you have experience with it, please let me know in the comment section.

Amazon VPC for People in a Hurry

Nkwenti Fon Nkwenti — Mon, 30 Aug 2021 09:35:02 +0000

An Amazon VPC is a service that lets you provision a logically isolated section of the AWS cloud where you can launch AWS resources in a virtual network that you define. A VPC gives you more control over your virtual networking environment, resource placement, connectivity and security. Like any AWS service, it comes with many configurable parameters, but you can still achieve a lot with the defaults if you are in a hurry.
In this post, we would look at the following;

A brief history of the AWS VPC
The infrastructure on which your VPC resides on
What you can do with the defaults
Some caveats

EC2-Classic

The Amazon VPC was initially released on the 25th of September 2009, about three years since AWS launched its first services. Before the Amazon VPC, resources such as EC2 instances were launched into what is now referred to as EC2-Classic. EC2-Classic was AWS's first iteration of a platform for creating virtual machines. The peculiarity of EC2-Classic was that the networking layer used by VMs was shared with all the other AWS tenants. This setup didn't look good to customers who owned and ran their workloads in privately owned on-prem datacenters.
If you created your AWS account after the 12th of April, 2013, then you would automatically provision VMs inside the EC2-VPC. Nowadays, it is just referred to as AWS VPC. EC2-Classic has been deprecated.

Where does my VPC reside in AWS's infrastructure?

An Amazon VPC is "regionally scoped", meaning it resides within a single AWS Region and cannot span to other Regions. This means before you create a VPC, you must choose a specific Region, say Cape Town or af-south-1. For those who are new to AWS, an AWS Region is a geographic area in the world where AWS operates cloud services. AWS Regions are designed to be completely independent of each other. Each AWS Region is composed of two or more Availability Zones, and each Availability Zone is, made up of at least two or more discrete data centres. The Availability Zones within the AWS Region have redundant networking and power.
Now when you launch a VPC in a specific region, it is advisable to take advantage of the high availability of the multiple Availability Zones by architecting and deploying your workloads across the Availability Zones.

The Default VPC

The default VPC is nothing more than a partially configured VPC that is created with your AWS account. Since a VPC is regionally scoped, The creation of an AWS account, also triggers the creation of default VPCs in all AWS Regions around the world. The advantage of having it preconfigured by AWS is that the customer can immediately launch services such as EC2 instances without going through further configuration steps. Most VPC services such as Elastic Load Balancing, EC2, Amazon RDS, and VPC virtual networking devices (such as the Internet Gateway and Nat Gateway) would work the same way as they would with a manually created VPC.

What are the partial configurations?

The following items are preconfigured automatically in the default VPC;

A CIDR block of 172.31.0.0/16
/20 subnets in all availability zones in the region taken from the CIDR range. For example, the Cape Town region would have the following one of the following subnets in each of its 3 availability zones; 172.31.0.0/20, 172.31.16.0/20, 172.31.32.0/20,
An internet gateway is already set up and connected to the default route table for each subnet.
A default security group that allows all traffic at the instance level. It is stateful and allows all outbound traffic, but inbound traffic is implicitly denied.
A default network access control list that controls traffic at the subnet level. By default, it allows all inbound and all outbound traffic.
A DHCP Options set to pass TCP/IP configurations to your instances.

How can I use the Default VPC?

As stated earlier, when you create an account in AWS or enable one of the newer regions, you already have the resources of a default VPC at your disposal. By default, when you launch a service such as an EC2 instance, it would be launched in the Default VPC if you do not specify a manually configured VPC at set up.

Some caveats

All VPCs come with the same CIDR of 172.31.0.0/16, which overlaps with the default VPCs in other regions. Services like VPC Peering require non-overlapping CIDR blocks to function. So your networking options are limited.
The components of the default VPC are intentionally permissive, which is a security risk. The internet gateway provides internet access, and the security groups and Network ACLs allow all traffic from any IP address and any TCP/UDP port. Security experts advise that the default VPC should be deleted as soon as you create your account.
If you delete your default VPC, you wouldn't have the possibility of re-creating it yourself so take note. But you can contact AWS support to have them re-create it for you.

Key takeaways

A VPC is nothing more than a logically scooped private portion of AWS's infrastructure where you can run workloads privately.
A default VPC is provisioned in every AWS Region by default for every account created. So if you don't want to spend time defining VPC components, you can get going with the default VPC.
If you don't explicitly configure a VPC, all your EC2 and RDS instances would be launched into the default VPC.
Just as with any default settings, permissiveness enables ease of use, but this is at the cost of security. Hence from a security perspective, the default VPC should be avoided.

Conclusion

I know you are in a hurry so we must leave it at this for now. As usual, you can find more information by clicking on the links in the resources section below. Feel free to follow up with me in the comments section or on Twitter. I hope this has been very informative to you. Have a good one!

References:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/default-vpc.html
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/how-it-works.html
https://aws.amazon.com/free/?all-free-tier.sort-by=item.additionalFields.SortRank&all-free-tier.sort-order=asc

AWS IAM for People in a Hurry.

Nkwenti Fon Nkwenti — Mon, 23 Aug 2021 11:15:51 +0000

Introduction

IAM, which stands for Identity Access Manager, is an AWS service that allows you to manage access to your compute, storage, database and application services on AWS' Cloud. This is done by creating users, groups and roles with the desired permissions to allow or deny access to your AWS resources. IAM is a global service and is available free of charge.

What we'll cover

What you can do with IAM
How you can set up a user with permissions
Limitations/caveats

What can you do with the service?

You can specify permissions to control which users can access specific services, the kind of actions they can perform and which resources are available, ranging from VMS, DB instances and even the ability to filter DB query results. You can determine which users have MFA access to specific Amazon EC2 resources and perform specific actions on those resources, such as restricting who can lunch an Amazon EC2 instance. In combination with CloudTrail, you can keep track of all of the API calls made by the IAM users.

You can create users and assign them passwords and secret access keys.

You can create groups with similar access patterns, for example, the developer team group. Each developer account would be assigned to the group and inherit the same permissions set at the group level.
You can integrate your existing enterprise identity system, such as Microsoft active directory. This is done by using standards-based federation technologies like SAML. It eliminates the need for additional sets of credentials to manage your AWS resources.

You can use roles to grant other people permissions to resources in your AWS account without sharing your password or secret access keys.

How does a typical setup look like?

Let us go through a few steps to set up an administrator account that you would use instead of your root account to manage your AWS compute, database, storage and application services. To make things smooth, the administrator account will have administrator privileges.

First of all, you need to sign up for an AWS account. You can refer to How to set up a Free Tier AWS account to get you up and running.
Search and click on IAM in the search bar on the AWS console to avoid scrolling through all the AWS services.
Click on Users on the left menu, then click on add user.

Click on Add user

Provide a name for the user and check AWS Management Console access.
Autogenerate password for the user and continue to permissions.
Click on Attach existing policies directly and check the AdministratorAccess Policy.

This step is optional, but you can add an appropriate tag for the user.

Review the configurations and click on Create user

Copy the sign-in link and the password which you would use to log in. You may also have the information sent to the user's email or download the .csv file with the information.
The contents of the .csv file are;
On the sign-in page, enter the username and auto-generated password.
The user would be prompted to create and confirm a new password
Once that is completed, the user would land on the console. Pay attention to the top right corner, which indicates which account is logged into the console.

Limitations/Caveats

You are limited to 1000 IAM roles, but this can be increased with a support request to AWS alongside your use case.
AWS account ID aliases must be unique across AWS products in your account.
A user can be assigned a maximum of 2 access keys.

Conclusion

I know you are in a hurry so we must leave it at this for now. As usual, you can find more information by clicking on the links in the resources section below. Feel free to follow up with me in the comments section or on Twitter. Hope this has been very informative to you. Have a good one!

Resources

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
AWS Identity and Access Management Documentation

A Month In The AWS Community Builders Program.

Nkwenti Fon Nkwenti — Tue, 22 Jun 2021 12:42:02 +0000

In my previous post, I explained what the AWS Community Builders Program is all about, how to apply, and some benefits officially advertised. I can't believe a month has already gone by. It sort of feels like the first weeks in a new boarding school. I'm still figuring out how to get adequately accommodated and where all the amenities and facilities are. What are the rules and timetables for activities, who are the cool kids, what are the older kids up to etc.? So far, I haven't seen any bullies. The community has got up to about 800 community builders, and there is quite a lot already happening. In this post, I'll share some of the exciting things which have caught my attention thus far.

Communication

Going by my boarding school analogy, Slack is the campus, and the campus is slack. Slack is where everything happens. Almost all communication starts and ends in Slack. All announcements, introductions, questions and networking start from here before branching into other platforms like dev.to, for blogposts, Twitch.tv for live sessions and Amazon Chime for webinars. For those who don't know what Slack is, it is simply a messaging platform. It is similar to Microsoft Teams which most people know about, although Teams is actually the copycat. I've never had to work for a company that uses Slack, but I'm part of other communities that rely on Slack for messaging and communication. I started using Slack regularly as of 2020, but 80% of the usage has been with the Community Builder's Program.

Amazon Chime, is a communications service that lets you meet, chat, and place business calls inside and outside your organization. Let's just call it Amazon's response to Zoom and Google Meet.

Although Twitch is popular with gamers, AWS has also got many channels covering multiple products and services. Before being accepted into the program under the Networking and Content Delivery category or topic, I already followed the Networking and Content Delivery Office Hours on Twitch.tv. It is a weekly live stream on Thursdays from 6:30 PM - 8 PM GMT+1, hosted by technical leaders who introduce AWS services and updates on what's new across the category.

The Welcome Calls

On June 3rd, there was a welcome call for all the new builders. It was announced on Slack and hosted on Amazon Chime by Jason Dunn. Jason is the AWS Community Builders Program Manager. He has done a great job on the FAQ Slack channel and is the bearer of good news like benefits on the #benefits channel. Jason did cover quite a lot in his 30-45 mins presentation, and I can't possibly go through everything with you, but here are some of the things which caught my attention.

What does AWS expect?

Amazon wants to empower Builders like you to gain experience with their services and share that expertise with others. They want to help you "level up", grow your public profile, expand your knowledge on all things AWS plus other skills (writing, public speaking, etc.)

How to engage with topic leaders.

Topic leaders are the primary point of contact for the topic, but they are not tech support. They will look for opportunities for beta participation. Not all of them are staffed with Developer advocates, and since they work at scale, 1:1 interactions aren't always guaranteed.

Some guidelines on social media posting

Always use #AWScommunity in all social post across all platforms. Please don't tag Jason if it is technical. You can tag your topic leaders on all your posts. AWS wants to see all the great stuff you are creating and sharing so that they can understand the impact it is having. We've got a tool to help provide visibility to our AWS related activities outside the program.

Benefits

In my previous post, I listed the following benefits as were officially advertised on the AWS Community Builders webpage;

Access to AWS product teams and information about new services and features.
Mentorship from AWS subject matter experts on a variety of topics, including content creation, community building, and securing speaking engagements.
AWS Promotional Credits and other helpful resources to support content creation and community-based work.

But Jason elaborated further and included even more benefits. Those that really caught my attention are;

Cloud Academy subscription. They produce a lot of high-quality content not only on AWS Certifications but on DevOps and Security.
$500 AWS Promotional Credits. This is super important, especially for AWS Networking labs. Many things are not included in the free-tier, such as NAT gateways hourly charges, Transit gateway attachments, Network Firewall hourly charges and virtual appliances from the AWS Market Place. With these credits, I would unleash the playful child in me and turn up all the knobs in the VPC (with billing alerts configured, of course)
Cool swag. These are AWS Community Builders Program branded items. The $500 AWS Promotional Credits mentioned in the previous point will be delivered as a gift card in the swag kit.
Certification exam voucher. I didn't plan on taking any certification exam until nextyear, but it is a free voucher which will expire after some months.

Some Interesting Stuff From The Community

With about 800 builders and multiple slack channels, a lot is happening every second. But there are a few things which caught my attention which I would like to share with you.

AWS Removes NAT Gateway's dependence on the Internet Gateway for private communications. The NAT Gateway enables instances in a private subnet without public IP addresses to be able to reach the internet by using the NAT Gateways own public IP address. Before this announcement, you needed to associate the NAT Gateway to an Internet Gateway. But now, you can select to set the connectivity type to private when creating a NAT Gateway. The NAT Gateway will use its private IP addresses when performing NAT operations. This makes it possible to connect to other VPCs, Transit Gateways or Virtual Private Gateways.
Fellow community builder Jared Donboch made a website showing the map of all community builders in their countries. It clearly shows that I am the only builder in Cameroon.

The map was done using the newly launched Amazon Location services. Jared wrote a 👉🏽post about how he built the website so please check it out.

What's Next

It was announced that all community members will eventually be listed on the public website, so I'm looking forward to seeing my name up there as well.
I will apply for the cloud academy subscription and maybe start preparing for the AWS Solutions Architect Professional Examination.
As soon as I get my own swag kit, I'll share the pictures with you
I'll be posting another review of the program same time next month.

Thank you for reading🙏🏿. If you are interested in knowing more about the program, please follow me on twitter@ fon_nkwenti.

The AWS Community Builders Program - What it is and how to apply.

Nkwenti Fon Nkwenti — Thu, 03 Jun 2021 18:26:45 +0000

I was recently accepted into the AWS Community Builder's program, so I shared my excitement and gratitude on social media, which naturally led to congratulatory messages in response. Some people actually thought I had landed a new position at AWS. I must admit, living in Cameroon and working for a company like AWS would be a good thing, but sorry, I'm not on Amazon's payroll (yet 🤫).
In this post, I want to share with you what the AWS Community Builders program is all about, who can apply, and the advertised benefits of joining the program.

So what is the AWS community Builders program?

The AWS Community Builders program offers technical resources, mentorship, and networking opportunities to AWS enthusiasts and emerging thought leaders who are passionate about sharing knowledge and connecting with the technical community.
The program isn't a lifetime achievement. It runs in 12-month intervals for each member, but if you feel you need to acquire more skills, say in another topic, you can re-apply to remain in the program.

What are the benefits of the program?

When you sign the NDA and join the program, you will eventually receive;

Access to AWS product teams and information about new services and features.
Mentorship from AWS subject matter experts on a variety of topics, including content creation, community building, and securing speaking engagements
AWS Promotional Credits and other helpful resources to support content creation and community-based work

Who can apply?

I know it sounds like you need to be quite skilled before applying for the program. After seeing what other builders were contributing on Twitter and LinkedIn, I personally felt like I wasn't yet ready for it. Although you must be 18 years of age or older, you must keep in mind that there are no single specific criteria for being accepted. However, your application will be reviewed for evidence and accuracy of technical content, such as blog posts, open-source contributions, community organization efforts, online knowledge sharing, etc. Community organization efforts, such as hosting AWS User Groups, Meetups and other events, are also reviewed. In my case, I started my blog in December 2020 and organized the first AWS user group in Douala in January before applying for the program.

What are Topics, and how many are there?

You would be asked to choose a topic when applying for the program. Topics are simply categories that cover specific technology areas. I think it is a brilliant idea because otherwise, it would be challenging to navigate the breadth of AWS services. I chose the Networking and Content Delivery Topic, which is lead by Michael Yitayew. The other topics include Containers, Data (databases, analytics, and BI), Developer Tools, Front-End Web and Mobile, Game Tech, Graviton/Arm Development, Management and Governance + Migration, Machine Learning, Security & Identity, Serverless, and Storage. You can join any of the topics you may be interested in.

Conclusion

If you are an AWS enthusiast, you create content, build software or organize events around AWS services, then you should definitely apply to join the program. You will find a lot of opportunities to connect to and learn from like-minded people.
Now that you know what the program is and the benefits of being accepted, I hope you have had enough reason to apply and join me and the others. We would love to network with you.
New applications will be open in Q3. Add your name to the waiting list and be notified when the next opportunity to apply opens later in 2021.

Useful Links

AWS Community Builder landing page
👇🏽
https://aws.amazon.com/developer/community/community-builders/

Add your email to get notified when the next opportunity to apply opens up
👇🏽
https://pages.awscloud.com/aws-community-builders-program-waitlist.html

If you want to have an idea on what you would fill in the online application, here is an apt post by my fellow community builder Adit Modi;
👇🏽
https://dev.to/aws-builders/aws-community-builders-program-how-to-apply-get-accepted-tips-tricks-4cn2builders/aws-community-builders-program-how-to-apply-get-accepted-tips-tricks-4cn2

For all other public announcements, follow 👉🏽 Jason Dunn

A Simple VPC Peering Tutorial

Nkwenti Fon Nkwenti — Wed, 10 Mar 2021 09:18:10 +0000

Introduction

AWS VPC Peering is a point-to-point network connection between two VPCs that leverages AWS networking infrastructure. With VPC Peering, you can connect VPCs belonging to the same or different accounts, residing in the same or different regions within the AWS Global infrastructure except for China.

For example, your company's IT department might have a VPC for file sharing. Since this is a shared resource, you may want to peer other VPCs to that central VPC, but you do not intend to enable direct communication between the other spoke VPCs.

In this blog post, we would look at the following;

Typical connectivity scenarios suitable for setting up VPC peering connections
How to set up a VPC peering connection between two VPCs in the same AWS account
Some limitations of VPC peering connections

Typical use cases

As customers continue to move and deploy workloads to AWS, the need for separation of function such as different departments, applications, trust zones becomes inevitable and using VPCs to achieve this becomes reasonable. There are 2 main scenarios where VPC peering is an ideal solution;

Your company might be part of a merger or acquisition, and existing VPCs running the same business functions might need to be connected, for example, the accounting or legal departments. If both VPCs are in the same trust zone and you require broad access to resources within the VPCs, then VPC peering is the ideal solution for you.
You might have central resources that need to be accessed by some departments or VPCs. In this scenario, the centralized services can be set up in a VPC with multiple VPC peering connections to all other departments and their VPCs.

How it works

Firstly, one of the VPCs (the requester) must initiate the VPC peering process, while the other VPC (the accepter) must accept the request for the peering connection to be established. The owner of the requester VPC sends a request to the owner of the accepter VPC. When the owner of the accepter VPC accepts the peering connection, the VPC peering becomes established. Very simple, isn't it.

Next, you need to configure routes in the routing tables of both VPCs to enable traffic to flow via the new VPC peering connection. The owner of each VPC peering connection must manually add the static route to their route tables that points the CIDR of the other VPC to the VPC peering connection target.

Finally, the requester and the accepter VPCs must also update their security groups and NACLs rules to allow traffic flow via the peering connection. Very simple, isn't it. Let's try it out then.

Setting it up

We would set up a VPC peering connection between two VPCs in the same account within the same region for simplicity sake. This would permit one user account with administrative permissions to perform all the tasks smoothly.

Prerequisites

You must have an AWS account. If not, click here to create a free-tier account.
You must have two VPCs with non-overlapping CIDRs within the same account. In our example, our VPCs are named VPC-A with a CIDR range of 10.1.0.0/16 and VPC-B with a CIDR range of 10.2.0.0/16.
Both VPCs must be in the same AWS Region.

Step 1

Go to https://console.aws.amazon.com/vpc/. You might need to sign in first.

Step 2

In the navigation pane, choose Peering Connections, Create Peering Connection.

Step 3

Configure the following information, and choose Create Peering Connection when you are done:

Peering connection name tag: You can optionally name your VPC peering connection.
VPC (Requester): Select the VPC in your account with which you want to create the VPC peering connection.

Under Select another VPC to peer with: Ensure My account is selected,
Select another of your VPCs.

The CIDR for VPC-B is automatically populated when selected in the VPC (Accepter)* field.

You may add an optional Tag, but you need to click on Create Peering Connection.

Step 4

In the confirmation dialogue box, choose OK.

Step 5

Select the VPC peering connection that you've created.
Click on the Actions dropdown menu.
Select Accept Request.

Step 6

In the confirmation dialogue, choose Yes, Accept.

A second confirmation dialogue displays; choose to Modify my route tables now to go directly to the route tables page, or choose Close to do this later.

Step 7

Modify the routing tables of VPC-A and VPC-B to permit routing between the VPCs via the peering connection.

Select the routing table for VPC-A.
Click on the Routes tab.
Click on Edit routes.

Click on Add router.
Input the CIDR for VPC-B.
Select the peering connection ID as the target for the route.
Click on Save routes.

Step 8

Modify the routing tables of VPC-A and VPC-B to permit routing between the VPCs via the peering connection.

Select the routing table for VPC-B.
Click on the Routes tab.
Click on Edit routes.

Click on Add router.
Input the CIDR for VPC-A.
Select the peering connection ID as the target for the route.
Click on Save routes.

Step 9

Some final verifications to make sure everything looks good;

On VPC-A's routing table, you can see a local route for its CIDR range as well as a route for VPC-B's CIDR of 10.2.0.0/16 with the peering connection as the target.

On VPC-B's routing table, you can see a local route for its CIDR range as well as a route for VPC-A's CIDR of 10.1.0.0/16 with the same peering connection as the target.

We can see all the information regarding the VPC peering connection and associated peers.

Some important things to know

VPC Peering does not support overlapping IPv4 addressing. As part of the VPC setup process, the subnets of both VPCs must be unique before the peering relation can be established.
VPC Peering does not support transitive peering relationships. This means that if VPC A is connected to VPC B, and VPC B is connected to VPC C, but VPC A and VPC C are not directly connected, VPC A and VPC C would not be able to make use of their connections to VPC B to establish a peering relationship. Furthermore, you cannot access other networks like the internet, AWS Direct Connect and VPN connections to on-premise networks via a VPC peering connection.
You can only have one VPC peering relationship between two VPCs. VPC A and VPC B cannot have multiple peering connections.
You can have a maximum of 125 VPC peering connections in your account.
For security reasons, IAM users do not have permissions to create or modify VPC peering connections by default. So you must configure and attach an IAM policy permitting the creation of the VPC peering to the IAM user or group of IAM users.
VPC peering is best used when many resources in one VPC must communicate with many resources in another VPC, and the environments of both VPCs are controlled and secured. But once the number of connected VPCs is above 10, you may want to look into another solution like the AWS Transit Gateway for inter-VPC communication.

Summary

VPC peering connections are a simple and straightforward way to enable communication between two VPCs within or between two different AWS accounts and/or regions.

It is ideal for situations that require broad access between a couple of VPCs in the same trust zone, making it suitable for central resource access scenarios. This can work fine for a few VPCs, but you should consider using the AWS Transit Gateway for connecting over 10 VPCs. It allows transitive routing and has many traffic engineering capabilities.

Before setting up a VPC peering connection, you need to ensure that the peers' CIDR ranges do not overlap. The user setting up the peering connection must also have the necessary permissions. The VPC peering connection is established when the requester VPC sends a request to the accepter VPC, and the accepter VPC accepts it. Traffic will only flow via the VPC peering connection if the appropriate routes are manually added to the peers' routing tables.

Hope this has been informative to you. I will be writing more posts on AWS VPC and networking related subjects in the coming months. But if you are in a hurry, you can enjoy little snippets of information on my AWS For People In A Hurry series which is coming soon.

Thanks for reading 👊🏽

Why you must join the Douala AWS User Group

Nkwenti Fon Nkwenti — Thu, 17 Dec 2020 10:32:54 +0000

"If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." - African Proverb.

Introduction

AWS is the largest public cloud provider with over 31% market share, followed by Microsoft Azure with 20% and Google Cloud Platform with 5%. Ever since AWS officially launched in 2006, they have been at the forefront of innovation, creating new paradigm shifts in how IT resources are being developed and used by enterprises worldwide. As enterprises continue to migrate some or all of their workloads to the public cloud, AWS is suitably positioned as the partner of choice. They have the most migration experience, the most comprehensive and mature migration tools, and more cloud services than the other players. AWS is just a platform with services and tools, but it requires developers, startups, and enterprises to take advantage and build with it. Communities of users have organically sprung up around the world, synergizing and pushing the limits of what individuals can achieve independently.

Why do user groups matter?

First and foremost, a user group is a community, and a community offers a place for like-minded people to learn, share, and discuss opportunities and solutions. Some problems are difficult to solve individually, but a community can offer support and direction. For example, it is almost impossible for a single individual to keep up with AWS's innovation pace. They started this year with 175 services, but more are being announced at the AWS re:Invent 2020 online event, which is still ongoing at the time of this post. A supportive community with members who have diverse skillsets is extremely vital.

With the continuous adoption of AWS in other parts of the world like Africa who saw its first AWS region go live in April 2020, the adoption rate will only increase. User groups are springing up around the continent, so another group closer to where you live or work is inevitable.

Why are we doing this?

I personally started my journey into cloud computing about 4 years ago after reading a couple of interesting news headlines. Cisco announced they were abandoning a 1 billion dollar investment in data center technologies, and VMWare subsequently announced VMware Cloud on AWS. So I learned a bit of everything and familiarized myself with most of the common AWS services.

Last year, I began to pay close attention and eventually took several AWS certification exams. As I got deeper into architectural discussions and projects, I had many issues and resorted to online communities. I also joined user groups in South Africa, Accra, and France. A particular thorn in my side was AWS Lamba. I reached out to Rosius, and he was able to sort out my misconfigurations. I was also of great help to Rosius, coming from an infrastructure background that he lacked as a developer.

Organizing this user group is also a way for us to contribute to the local community by sharing our collective experience and knowledge. Everyone has got a story to tell, so we are equally open to learning from the community.

What's in it for you?

AWS Douala user group is a peer-to-peer user group. You would meet other highly skilled and motivated developers like you who might have the answer to whatever problem you are stuck with. We intend for you to:

meet talented people
learn something new
give back to the community
get recognition for your participation

We believe anyone working in the ICT sector and living in Douala should join the Douala AWS User Group.

I'm a noob and don't know anything about the cloud

You don't need to be an expert to join. All you need is the will, the time, and the curiosity to learn. Then you can contribute to the community and other open-source projects with your unique experience. But you must have a computer and an internet connection.😉

Our Activities

We will have physical and online meetups at a regular cadence to bring all members together under a central theme, task, or goal. Before and after our meetups, we will have a few minutes for networking.
The main activities will be;

30mins - 40mins presentations by highly motivated and experienced individuals who may or may not be members of the group
hackathons
Q&A
lucky draws and prices
free food and drink whenever we get sponsors

How to join

Firstly, you need a registered account so go to www.meetup.com if you don't already have one.
Secondly, you can find us on our meetup page Douala AWS User Group. Click on the Join this group button, and you are in.
We will send you information about our meetups and other events so you won't be alone.

One last thing

Please take the time to answer our polls and our survey . This would provide us with valuable feedback on making the community a better place for you. See below the links to the polls and survey, respectively;

https://www.meetup.com/awsugdouala/polls/
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Zt7eA4tNjLvOuGYErJTD7WfAwXxMfSu72Dg8--0_zRY/edit

Wrap Up

We would love to give you the opportunity and platform to grow and become a better version of yourself. If you are new, then you are in a better position to upskill yourself. We would be releasing the agenda for our first meetup very soon. So once again, sign up and be notified about future events.

DEV Community: Nkwenti Fon Nkwenti

AWS Community Builders - Christmas Edition

What surprises you most about the community builders program?

What’s your background and your experience with AWS?

What’s the biggest benefit you see from the program?

What’s the next swag item that you would like to get?

What are you eating for dinner today? Share the recipe!

Jollof Rice Kamer (Cameroon) style

Is there anything else you would like to say about the community builders program in 2022?

Getting Started with AWS CLI v2 as a Docker Container

What you will learn

Pre-requisites

Installing Docker

Download and run the AWS CLI v2 container.

Sharing host credentials.

Shortening the Docker command

Updating the AWS CLIv2

Conclusion

Further Reading

Amazon VPC for People in a Hurry

EC2-Classic

Where does my VPC reside in AWS's infrastructure?

The Default VPC

What are the partial configurations?

How can I use the Default VPC?

Some caveats

Key takeaways

Conclusion

References:

AWS IAM for People in a Hurry.

Introduction

What we'll cover

What can you do with the service?

How does a typical setup look like?

Limitations/Caveats

Conclusion

Resources

A Month In The AWS Community Builders Program.

Communication

The Welcome Calls

What does AWS expect?

How to engage with topic leaders.

Some guidelines on social media posting

Benefits

Some Interesting Stuff From The Community

What's Next

The AWS Community Builders Program - What it is and how to apply.

So what is the AWS community Builders program?

What are the benefits of the program?

Who can apply?

What are Topics, and how many are there?

Conclusion

Useful Links

A Simple VPC Peering Tutorial

Introduction

Typical use cases

How it works

Setting it up

Prerequisites

Step 1

Step 2

Step 3

Step 4

Step 5

Step 6

Step 7

Step 8

Step 9

Some important things to know

Summary

Further Reading

Why you must join the Douala AWS User Group

Introduction

Why do user groups matter?

Why are we doing this?

What's in it for you?

I'm a noob and don't know anything about the cloud

Our Activities

How to join

One last thing