Author: Lino Almojela

AWS Recycle Bin

AWS Recycle Bin: Your Key to Enhanced Data Protection and Recovery

Introduction

As more and more companies depend on the cloud infrastructure to run their businesses, at the same time they need a strong strategy to protect and recover their data, as accidental deletions or unexpected failures can lead to critical data loss, resulting in downtime and potential financial losses. AWS well known for its wide range of services, provides various tools to keep data safe and retrievable. Among these, the AWS Recycle Bin service stands out as a powerful feature to improve data recovery options. This blog explores the AWS Recycle Bin service, what it offers, and how to use it to protect your important resources.

Getting to Know AWS Recycle Bin

The Recycle Bin service, in the context of AWS, is a concept often used to describe a safety mechanism for storing and recovering deleted resources. While AWS doesn’t offer a specific service named “Recycle Bin,” users can implement similar functionality using AWS services like AWS Lambda and Amazon S3.

In this setup, when a resource is deleted, it isn’t immediately gone forever. Instead, it’s moved to a specific storage area, often called a “Recycle Bin” or “Trash,” where it remains for a set period before being permanently deleted. This serves as a safety net, allowing users to easily recover accidentally deleted resources without needing to go through complicated backup and recovery processes.

By using AWS Lambda functions and S3 event notifications, you can automate the transfer of deleted resources to the Recycle Bin and set up policies for how long they should be retained before final deletion. This approach strengthens your data protection and management strategy within your AWS environment.

The AWS Recycle Bin is particularly useful when mistakes happen or automated systems accidentally delete resources. By enabling the Recycle Bin, you ensure that even if a resource is deleted, it can still be restored, preventing data loss and avoiding service interruptions.

Benefits of AWS Recycle Bin

Enhanced Data Protection: It allows you to recover deleted resources within a specified period, reducing the risk of permanent data loss.

Compliance and Governance: It ensures that data is not permanently lost due to accidental deletions, which is essential for maintaining audit trails and adhering to data retention policies.

Cost Management: By setting appropriate retention periods, you can manage storage costs effectively.

Let’s now get to the hands-on.

Implementation Steps

Make sure you have an EC2 instance up and running.

Get EBS Volume Information

AWS Elastic Block Store (EBS) is a scalable block storage service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS), offering persistent storage volumes for EC2 instances. To view your block storage, in the EC2 dashboard move to the storage tab.

Take a Snapshot of the Volume

An AWS EBS snapshot is a point-in-time backup of an EBS volume stored in Amazon S3. It captures all the data on the volume at the time the snapshot is taken, including the data that is in use and any data that is pending EBS snapshots are commonly used for data backup, disaster recovery, and creating new volumes from existing data.

On the left side of EC2 UI, click Snapshots then click Create Snapshot.

In the Create snapshot UI, under resource types, select volumes. Then under volume ID, select the drop-down button and select your EBS volume.

Scroll down and click Create Snapshot.

Success.

Head to the Recycle Bin console and click the Create retention rule.

Fill in retention rule details.

Under retention settings for resource type select the drop-down button and select EBS Snapshot, then tick the box apply for all resources, then for retention period, select one day.

For the Rule lock settings, select Unlock.

Rule Created

Now go ahead and delete the snapshot

Open the recycle bin

Click on the snapshot present in the recycle bin

Objective achieved

Snapshot recovered successfully

Conclusion

The AWS Recycle Bin service offers a valuable layer of protection against accidental deletions, ensuring that critical resources like EBS snapshots and AMIs can be recovered within a defined period. Whether you’re protecting against human error or looking to strengthen your disaster recovery strategy, AWS Recycle Bin is an essential tool in your AWS toolkit.

This brings us to the end of this article.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more.

If you have any questions concerning this article or have an AWS project that requires our assistance, please reach out to us by leaving a comment below or email us at [email protected].

Thank you!

Blogs

Scaling Big Data with Amazon Redshift

Post author By Lino Almojela
Post date September 11, 2024
No Comments on Scaling Big Data with Amazon Redshift

Scaling Big Data with Amazon Redshift: Insights into Managing Large Databases

In today’s world driven by data, companies face a flood of information making it essential to analyze and understand this data. This is where Amazon Redshift, a fully managed cloud data warehouse service, comes into play. Designed to handle large-scale data analytics and processing tasks. It helps businesses to gain deeper insights, faster query performance, and cost-effective scalability.

What is Big Data?

Big Data is a term used to describe extremely large and complex datasets that cannot be easily processed or analyzed using traditional data processing tools.

With the boom of digital technologies, we generate vast amounts of data from various sources such as social media, sensors, online transactions, etc. Big Data encompasses all this information, and it continues to grow rapidly.

Importance of a Data Warehouse

For organizations that need to manage and analyze large amounts of data, a data warehouse is essential. It enables them to make informed decisions based on the data, by providing a comprehensive view of the organization’s data in one place.

Importance of a Data Warehouse

Centralized Data Storage: With a data warehouse, all data is stored in one place, making it easier to manage and analyze. This eliminates the need for businesses to search through multiple sources to find the data they need.

Data Integration: A data warehouse allows businesses to integrate data from various sources, including applications, relational databases, and external sources. This makes it possible to combine data from different systems and gain a more complete view of business operations.

Efficient Analysis: With a data warehouse, businesses can perform complex queries, data analysis, and reporting to derive actionable insights. This enables them to make informed decisions based on their data.

Scalability and Performance: A data warehouse can handle large datasets and provide high-performance processing. This makes it possible for businesses to store and analyze vast amounts of data, even as their needs grow over time.

Traditional Data Warehouse Challenges

Traditional data warehousing solutions had many challenges that made them insufficient for managing and analyzing Big Data. Some of these challenges include:

Lack of Scalability
Lack of Data Integration:
High Cost
Low Performance
Lack of Real-time Processing and Analysis

Introduction to AWS Redshift

What is AWS Redshift?

AWS Redshift is a cloud-based data warehousing service that allows businesses to store and analyze large amounts of structured and semi-structured data in a scalable and cost-effective manner. It is designed to handle petabyte-scale data processing and analysis tasks and is a fully managed data warehouse service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Redshift Architecture and Components

A Redshift cluster consists of one or more nodes. Each cluster has a leader node and one or more compute nodes.

Leader Node: Manages communication with client applications and coordinates query execution.

Compute Nodes: Execute queries and store data. Each compute node has its CPU, memory, and storage.

Nodes and Node Types

Redshift offers different node types based on your performance and storage requirements:

Dense Compute (DC): Optimized for high performance with SSD storage.

Dense Storage (DS): Optimized for large storage capacity with HDDs.

Redshift Spectrum and Data Lake Integration

Redshift Spectrum allows you to query data directly from Amazon S3 without having to load it into Redshift. This feature enables seamless integration with your data lake, allowing you to extend your data warehouse to exabytes of data in S3.

Use Cases for AWS Redshift.

Data Warehousing: Redshift can be used as a centralized repository for all enterprise data, enabling organizations to store and manage large volumes of structured and unstructured data.

Business Intelligence: Redshift can help organizations process and analyze large volumes of data to uncover insights that can inform business decisions.

Machine Learning: Redshift can be used as a data source for machine learning applications, providing access to large volumes of structured and unstructured data that can be used to train machine learning models.

Data Analytics: With Redshift, organizations can analyze large volumes of data to identify patterns, trends, and anomalies.

Getting Started with AWS Redshift

Note: In this demo, we will focus on navigating the console and exploring its features rather than creating a Redshift cluster, as provisioning a cluster could incur significant costs.

Access the Redshift Console: Navigate to the AWS Management Console and search for Redshift in the search bar then select Redshift under services.

Creating and Configuring a Redshift Cluster

Click on Create cluster.

Choose a cluster identifier, database name, and master user credentials.

Select the node type and the number of nodes based on your needs.

Configure Cluster Settings:

Choose the VPC and subnet group for network settings.

Configure the security settings, including setting up security groups for network access control.

Launch the Cluster:

Review your settings and click on Create cluster.

This brings us to the end of this article.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more.

If you have any questions concerning this article or have an AWS project that requires our assistance, please reach out to us by leaving a comment below or email us at [email protected].

Thank you!

Tags Amazon Cloud Computing, Amazon Cloud Services

Blogs

AWS Code Commit Obsolete

AWS CodeCommit Obsolete: Transitioning from AWS CodeCommit and Steps for a Seamless Migration

AWS CodeCommit, Amazon Web Services’ fully managed version control service, has been a leading solution for developers and organizations seeking a scalable, secure, and reliable version control system. However, AWS recently announced that it will no longer accept new customers for CodeCommit, effective June 6, 2024.

In this article, we’ll examine the impact of this phase-out, examine alternative version control systems, and offer tips on seamlessly transitioning your repositories.

Adapting to AWS CodeCommit’s Shutdown: Key Impacts and Your Next Step

AWS’s choice to end CodeCommit is part of a bigger plan to simplify its offerings and cut down on duplicate services. The rise in popularity of more powerful platforms like GitHub and GitLab, which provide advanced features and strong community backing, has had a big impact on this change. If you’re still using CodeCommit, the takeaway is clear: you can still access your repositories, but it’s time to start thinking about moving. AWS has given helpful documentation to help you through the switch to a new platform.

Exploring Alternative Version Control Systems

With CodeCommit being phased out, organizations need to explore alternative version control systems, and here are some of the top options.

GitHub: It’s the world’s largest Git repository hosting service and offers extensive features, including GitHub Actions for CI/CD, a vibrant community, and seamless integration with many third-party tools.

GitLab: It stands out for its built-in DevOps capabilities, offering robust CI/CD pipelines, security features, and extensive integration options.

Bitbucket: It is well-suited for teams already using Atlassian products like Jira and Confluence.

Self-Hosted Git Solutions: This is for organizations with specific security or customization requirements.

Migrating your AWS CodeCommit Repository to a GitHub Repository

Before you start the migration, make sure you have set up a new repository and the remote repository should be empty.

The remote repository may have protected branches that do not allow force push. In this case, navigate to your new repository provider and disable branch protections to allow force push.

Log into the AWS management console and navigate to the code commit console, in the AWS CodeCommit console, select the clone URL for the repository you will migrate. The correct clone URL (HTTPS, SSH, or HTTPS (CRC)) depends on which credential type and network protocol you have chosen to use.

In my case, I am using HTTPS.

Step 1: Clone the AWS CodeCommit Repository
Clone the repository from AWS CodeCommit to your local machine using Git. If you’re using HTTPS, you can do this by running the following command:

git clone https://your-aws-repository-url your-aws-repository

Replace your-aws-repository-url with the URL of your AWS CodeCommit repository.

Change the directory to the repository you’ve just cloned.

Step 2: add the New Remote Repository.

Navigate to the directory of your cloned AWS CodeCommit repository. Then, add the repository URL from the new repository provider.

git remote add <provider name> <provider-repository-url>

Step 3. Push Your Repository to the New Provider

Push your local repository to the new remote repository

This will push all branches and tags to your new repository provider’s repository. The provider’s name must match the provider’s name from step 2.

git push <provider name> –mirror

I use SSH keys for authentication, so I will run the git set URL command to authenticate with my SSH keys. Then lastly will run the git push command.

Step 4. Verify the Migration

Once the push is complete, verify that all files, branches, and tags have been successfully migrated to the new repository provider. You can do this by browsing your repository online or cloning it to another location and checking it locally.

Step 5: Update Remote URLs in Your Local Repository

If you plan to continue working with the migrated repository locally, you may want to update the remote URL to point to the new provider’s repository instead of AWS CodeCommit. You can do this using the following command:

git remote set-url origin <provider-repository-url>

Replace <provider-repository-url> with the URL of your new repository provider’s repository.

Step 6: Update CI/CD Pipelines

If you have CI/CD pipelines set up that interact with your repositories, such as GitLab, GitHub, or AWS CodePipeline, update their configuration to reflect the new repository URL. If you removed protected branch permissions in Step 3 you may want to add these back to your main branch.

Step 7: Inform Your Team

If you’re migrating a repository that others are working on, be sure to inform your team about the migration and provide them with the new repository URL.

Step 8: Delete the Old AWS CodeCommit Repository

This action cannot be undone. Navigate back to the AWS CodeCommit console and delete the repository that you have migrated.

Conclusion

By carefully evaluating your options and planning your migration, you can turn this transition into an upgrade for your development processes. Embracing a new tool not only enhances your team’s efficiency but also ensures you stay aligned with current industry standards.

This brings us to the end of this blog.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more.

If you have any questions concerning this article or have an AWS project that requires our assistance, please reach out to us by leaving a comment below or email us at [email protected].

Thank you!

Tags Amazon Cloud Services, AWS, AWS Cloud Computing

Blogs

Different Types of The WebEx Meetings

Post author By Lino Almojela
Post date September 4, 2024
No Comments on Different Types of The WebEx Meetings

What are the different types of the WebEx meetings

There are three types of WebEx meetings:

Personal Room meeting
Standard Scheduled meeting
Personal Conference meeting

Meetings offers a feature-rich collaboration experience. But when should you use a Webex Personal Room meeting, a standard scheduled meeting, or a Personal Conference meeting? Use this knowledge article to decide which type of meeting works best for you.

Personal Room Meeting
- Personal Room meetings are best for impromptu meetings, and back-to-back meetings in which the meeting host wants to remain in one meeting room for several meetings and have attendees join at different times.
- You can start a Personal Room meeting from your Webex site. You can schedule single occurrence and recurring Personal Room meetings in Outlook using the Webex Meetings Desktop App.
- Attendees can’t join before the meeting starts but, during a meeting, you can lock your Personal Room. People wait in a virtual lobby until you admit them. You can also set your Personal Room to lock automatically zero to 20 minutes after the meeting starts.
- You can add cohosts or alternate hosts to let others host your Personal Room meetings without you.
- Your cohosts or alternate hosts can schedule personal meetings on your behalf.
- All Personal Room meetings use your Personal Room URL as the meeting link that users click to join. Your Personal Room URL is in the format company.webex.com/meet/ username.
- All meetings use your Personal Room video address as the video address that users dial if they join by video system.
Standard Scheduled meeting
- You can schedule a standard meeting from your Cisco Webex site, in Microsoft Outlook using the Cisco Webex Meetings Desktop App, or from your mobile device.
- You can schedule single occurrence or recurring meetings.
- You can choose to require registration when you schedule the meeting.
- You can choose to allow attendees to join the meeting up to 15 minutes before start time when you schedule the meeting.
- You can add alternate hosts and let anyone with a host account on the Webex site host the meeting.
- Someone with a host account on the Webex site can schedule a meeting on your behalf. You are the only host who can start the meeting.
- Each meeting has a unique meeting URL that users click to join.
- Each meeting has a unique video address that users dial if they join by video system.
Personal Conference meeting
- A Personal Conference meeting is an audio-only meeting that’s like a conference call. This meeting type can be escalated to a standard scheduled meeting, if needed. A meeting URL is generated when a Personal Conference meeting is scheduled.
- You can schedule single occurrence meetings from your Webex site and in Outlook using the Webex Meetings Desktop App. You can schedule recurring meetings using the Webex Meetings Desktop App.
- You can add alternate hosts to let others host your Personal Conference Meetings without you.
- We don’t recommend that you allow attendees to join before the meeting starts. Doing so could allow unwanted participants to potentially cause fraudulent telephony charges before the host joining.
- If you escalate the meeting to a standard Webex meeting, each meeting has a unique meeting URL that users click to join.
- The maximum number of participants is 500 audio-only participants. If escalated to an online meeting, the first 25 participants can join.

See the table and following descriptions for more details.

Tags Cisco Webex, Cisco Webex Meetings, Webex

Blogs

Setting Up the Scheduled Meeting

Post author By Lino Almojela
Post date September 3, 2024
No Comments on Setting Up the Scheduled Meeting

Setting up the Scheduled Meeting (Normal Meeting)

Schedule a meeting from the Meetings calendar when you want to schedule a one-time meeting link or a personal room meeting.

Steps to schedule a meeting (Via WebEx App)

Step 1: Go to Meetings

Step 2: Click Schedule a meeting , and then enter your meeting info:

Edit the meeting topic.
choose a Startand End date and time.
Check Recurrence and choose the meeting frequency.
Select a Meeting link, and choose Generate a one-time meeting link

Step 3: Add Invitees, enter names or email addresses.

NOTE: When your account is set up with Hybrid Calendar , you see icons beside each person’s name to show their availability.

Available
Unavailable
Unknown availability

Step 4: Add Rooms, enter the name of a meeting room.

NOTE: When your account is set up with Hybrid Calendar, you see icons beside each room name to show the availability.

Available
Unavailable

Step 5: Click Schedule

The meeting is created and added to your calendar. An email invitation is sent to everyone invited to the meeting. If you need to make changes, you can update the meeting details or cancel the meeting.

Steps to schedule a meeting (Via WebEx Scheduler in Microsoft Outlook):

By using the Webex Scheduler, you can schedule Webex meetings or Webex Personal Room meetings directly from Microsoft Outlook. The calendar invite shows the Webex meeting details, including a link to join the meeting.

Below are the steps to schedule the meeting from outlook:

Step1: Create an appointment in Outlook.

Step2: Enter the appointment name, location, and start and end times.

Step3: If you want the appointment to repeat, do one of the following:

Select Recurrence in the ribbon and then select how often you want this appointment to repeat and when you want it to end.

Step4: To invite others, do one of the following:

Select Invite Attendees and then type one or more email addresses in the Required box.

Step5: in the Cisco Webex group on the ribbon in Outlook, select Add Webex Meeting.

Step6: (Optional) Edit the meeting options, such as add an alternate host or cohost. You can also set the entry and exit tone, change the meeting password, or add a tracking code. in the Cisco Webex group on the ribbon in Outlook, select Webex Preferences