In this post I’ll be creating a second AWS account using AWS Organizations. But first of all I should probably explain why! I’m looking to improve my backup strategy. I currently make use of Google Drive for most of my small and regularly used files, and once a month I copy my larger and seldom-used files to an external HD that I keep offsite. This process has several inherent problems, including:

In this post I’ll be making some changes to the blog configuration. Up till now it’s been running with the Even theme defaults, so let’s put a bit of personality into it! First of all, let’s change the author name. Currently the author is listed as olOwOlo on the front page and at the bottom of each post: In the config.toml file, this value is set using the name key under [author]:

In this post I’ll assign an Elastic IP to my Exam_CSAA_Maarek_3 EC2 instance. I stopped the instance last time to reduce charges: Note there is no Public IP listed. Starting the instance allocates a new IP address: And while rebooting the instance doesn’t change this, stopping and starting it again attaches another completely different IP: Depending on what the instance is being used for this could cause issues.

In this post I’ll be following Stephane Maarek’s AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate course on EC2 fundamentals to create an Amazon Linux EC2 instance and then SSH into it. We begin by launching an Amazon Linux 2 AMI T2 Micro with default settings and storage. A new security group is then created with the following values: Type SSH Protocol TCP Port Range 22 Source 0.0.0.0/0 (This is NOT ideal but I’m reliably informed this is only temporary) This is followed with the creation of a new key pair, and ultimately the creation of the EC2 instance itself.

In this post we’ll be setting up some billing alerts on our AWS account. I’ll be following the AWS documentation to create one on CloudWatch, and will set one up on AWS Budgets as well. Why create both? Firstly I intend to set both alerts to a low amount and then compare the outputs of both methods of alerting to see if one is preferable. Also there is a difference in cost between the two methods - outside of free tier CloudWatch custom metrics cost 0.