In this post we’ll be setting up Amazon Simple Notification System (SNS) to enable it to email me in response to an alarm I’m going to be setting up. SNS uses two principles to operate: Topics, which is what messages are about Subscriptions, which is where the messages are going and how they will be sent So a topic might be a report failure, and the subscriptions associated with the topic might be the report owner’s email address, the Service Desk website and the Out Of Hours mobile number.

In this post we’ll create and configure an S3 bucket for hosting a static website. Before I start, let me say that there are numerous guides for this process online. I have nothing new to add here - this post is intended to reflect my experience as opposed to being a how-to. The AWS documentation is easy to follow and is guaranteed to be up to date, a guarantee that other blogs (including this one) can’t make.

In this post I’ll cover my experience with the recent AWS Innovate online conference, focusing on Machine Learning & AI. This was something of a departure for me as my job and AWS focus has so far been predominantly databases, but the area of Machine Learning & AI is a rapidly expanding one and with the tools AWS brings to the table this AWS Innovate edition represented an ideal opportunity to get some insight.

In this post we’ll be building the AmazonWebShark blog. It’s time to start making AmazonWebShark! So far I’ve been writing the posts using Google Docs which lets me plan my formatting, check my spellings etc, but for any of the posts to make it to the blog they need to be in Markdown format. Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool that is quick to pick up, requires no installation and is well supported.

In this post we’ll be adding content to the example.com site we created previously using Hugo. Hugo’s quick start guide suggests creating content via the command hugo new posts/my-first-post.md, where everything before the forward slash is the command and everything after is the filename (md being the suffix for Markdown, which I’ll go into in a later post). This worked, but unhelpfully created the file at a completely different location to the one I’d been working at: