Making the Case for AWS VPC Endpoints

Since I have been using AWS for quite some time (since 2008) I have witnessed benefited from many of the innovations AWS has rolled out over the years. In this post I want to discuss a couple of specific values with VPC Endpoints (for S3 specifically – technically, Gateway endpoints for Amazon S3), including leveraging […]

AWS Passes 2% of Available IPv4 Addresses

On Sept. 1, 2022 at 2:43:08 (UTC) AWS announced/published IPv4 addresses hit 74,338,005, which is 2.0079% of all usable public IPv4 addresses. That’s a rather significant milestone if you ask me! Naturally the first question is likely, how does one know how many IP addresses does AWS announce/publish? The simple answer is that AWS regularly […]

AWS EC2 Instance Types per Region or Local Zone

After completing my recent post, “What Is The Size And Scope Of AWS Anyway?” I stumbled across another interesting metric to compare one region to another across AWS – EC2 instance types offered per region. While attempting to launch a test EC2 instance into a local zone I was getting a rather unuseful error message […]

What is the Size and Scope of AWS Anyway?

Admittedly this is a bit of a loaded question. There are certainly a number of metrics by which something like this can be measured – gross revenue; number of employees; percent of market share; services/products offered; infrastructure footprint; and so on. By all accounts AWS is the “biggest” of all cloud providers and a quick […]

Surviving an(other) AWS Outage – US-West-2 Outage 8/31/2021

I have been running workloads on AWS since 2008, and have experienced a few either AZ or Region-based outages. Although rare various issues can arise which cause one or more services to have an outage, or as AWS typically terms it, “some customers are experiencing increased error rates….” or something like that. The first such, […]

End of an Era – EC2-Classic Retiring

I first tried out EC2 from AWS in late 2008 and wrote this simple post about it. I wrote about (the very few) EC2 instance types in the early days…. How to do things like ping EC2 instances after enabling security group rules using early AWS CLI tools…. Some of the early tools, like Elasticfox […]

Find Last Reboot Time in Windows with PowerShell

A few years back I wrote, “Find Last Reboot Time in Windows 7, Vista and Windows 2008,” where you could find this info via command prompt. This is an update to that for later versions of Windows using PowerShell. This first way will display how long the network service has been running.  Generally this will […]

FREE (or VERY cheap) EC2 Proxy Server – Windows Over Ubuntu Proxy on AWS

Ever been sitting in a hotel (or your home) and tried to watch your favorite sports team on a streaming service, but couldn’t due to the archaic and draconian broadcast licensing agreements which ban in-market online distribution?!? And the name brand hotel chain doesn’t carry the local affiliate for your pennant-chasing team?!? WTF!?! Or, you […]

A Few of My Favorite Online Tools

IP Calculator ipcalc takes an IP address and netmask and calculates the resulting broadcast, network, Cisco wildcard mask, and host range. By giving a second netmask, you can design subnets and supernets. It is also intended to be a teaching tool and presents the subnetting results as easy-to-understand binary values. IP Calculator Results. DNS Propagation […]

AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Official Study Guide: Associate Exam Review

As I posted recently I’ve been using some great resources to prepare for some AWS exams. In my AWS Certified Solutions Architect Official Study Guide: Associate Exam review I raved about how good it is in assisting to prepare for the exam. Now I want to talk about the, “AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Official Study Guide: Associate […]