Today, let’s take a colloquial look at automatically granting ingress access to your Elastic Beanstalk apps that need to use RDS resources. When we first started, we brought up our RDS instance and our Elastic Beanstalk instance. The two weren’t connected. Of course, as soon as the instance tried to connect to the SQL Server, it couldn’t. Why? Because the RDS security group blocks all access by default, only allowing in what you specify.…

So, you’re running an ASP.NET app in IIS on Elastic Beanstalk and trying to figure out how to keep the app from shutting down due to idleness. Read on, my friend. The answer to your problem lies below. As you’re no doubt aware, low-traffic ASP.NET web apps can time out on IIS due to idleness. This is the server’s way of helping you conserve resources and make sure the machine is available to serve higher demand applications.…

We use New Relic for Application Performance Monitoring on our ASP.NET and node.js applications. Recently, we’ve started moving our infrastructure from on-premise into Amazon Web Services (AWS). Because we’re just beginners, we started out with the Elastic Beanstalk service, which allows us to easily deploy new versions of our applications backed by a decent infrastructure. In an on-premise situation, we’d manually install the .NET Agent and the Infrastructure Agent. But working with Elastic Beanstalk means we need to take a different approach to keep things efficient and consistent.…

The site you’re reading is now statically hosted on AWS S3. Because the only thing that doesn’t change is change and my site doesn’t change that much so I decided to change it to something that doesn’t change. - me I decided to switch Notebook Heavy from a dynamically generated, traditional blogging engine, to one that is written offline and statically rendered. The reasons are both financial and operational, so read on to find out more about what I did and why.…

Turns out, AWS security groups secure your stuff, even if you don’t know it. At my employer, we finally got access to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Vinyl Deals runs on Microsoft’s Azure cloud. Despite the fact that I’ve written articles about AWS before, my familiarity with modern AWS is still in the beginning phase. On day one playing with our shiny new AWS tools, I set up a development SQL Server using RDS.…

Recently, I went over how to setup SQL Server on Amazon RDS from within Visual Studio. In that article, I noted that there are differences between SQL Azure and SQL Server on Amazon RDS and that we needed more work to thoroughly investigate any limitations of SQL Server on RDS. I specifically called out the ability to run .NET assemblies (otherwise known as SQLCLR) as a possible deal breaker for some.…

In the past, if you were a SQL Server shop and wanted to use the Amazon AWS cloud, your only option was to bring up Windows Virtual Machine instances and run those machines just like your on premises machines. With the new Amazon RDS SQL Server options, developers and IT shops can now spin up standalone SQL Server databases without having to worry about the machines that are hosting those databases.…

Today I was made aware that in my series on Amazon SimpleDB for Windows Phone, I had mentioned that part 4 would contain some code samples and talk about encryption. I was confused for a second because I knew there was no part 4 and I thought the series was done. The series is not done. This is part 4 where we’ll show how to decrypt the credentials sent from the TVM.…

In response to a question in the comments on how to do a PutAttribute on SimpleDB, I’ve put together this post. These are fragments of code and not a complete source file. Hopefully if someone is looking for information, this can help as a guide. This code was written for Windows Phone 7 (i.e. Silverlight). To implement this fully, you’ll need to fill in the methods named CalculateStringToSignV2 and HmacSign. It is done via a GET method so all of the data is sent in the query string.…

One important aspect of accessing SimpleDB on a Windows Phone directly is that it isn’t going through another service that can handle securing the credentials needed to access SimpleDB. SimpleDB, like most (if not all) AWS services, requires two pieces of information to secure a request of the service: AWS Access Key ID and Secret Key. These are two pieces of data that I would rather not put on a device that people carry around with them.…