Recent Articles on the tecRacer AWS Blog

Build Golden AMIs with Packer and AWS CodePipeline

When leveraging AWS services such as EC2, ECS, or EKS, achieving standardized and automated image creation and configuration is essential for securely managing workloads at scale. The concept of a Golden AMI is often used in this context. Golden AMIs represent pre-configured, hardened and thoroughly tested machine images that encompass a fully configured operating system, essential software packages, and customizations tailored for specific workload. It is also strongly recommended to conduct comprehensive security scans during the image creation process to mitigate the risk of vulnerabilities. By adopting Golden AMIs, you can ensure consitent configuration across different environments, leading to decreased setup and deployment times, fewer configuration errors, and a diminished risk of security breaches. In this blog post, I would like to demonstrate how you can leverage AWS CodePipeline and AWS Stepfunctions, along with Terraform and Packer, to establish a fully automated pipeline for creating Golden AMIs.

Import existing resources into an AWS CloudFormation Stack

Presentation Deploying resources with infrastructure as code is the recommended way to provision resources in AWS. The native AWS-way of doing it is by using Cloudformation or CDK (Cloud Development Kit), and you should of course do this from day one. But in real world sometimes somebody provisioned resources via the console, or there is a need of refactor your code and split your stack into multiple stacks. Luckily It is not very often we have cases where it’s required to import resources.

Climb the (bed)rock with Python, Javascript and GO

Bedrock is now available in eu-central-1. It’s time to get real and use it in applications. Reading all blog posts about Bedrock, you might get the impression that Python and LangChain is the only way to do it. Quite the opposite! As Bedrock makes calling the models available as AWS API, all AWS SDKs are supported! This post shows how to use Bedrock with Python, Javascript and GO.

SAP HANA High Availability on AWS - How tecRacer helped secure cash register operations for Germany's leading department store chain

Galeria Karstadt Kaufhof and tecRacer have been collaborating on developing Galeria’s Cloud Platform for many years with tecRacer as their Go-To Partner for everything related to AWS. The work we have been doing ranges from designing, setting up and operating their landing zone and network infrastructure, managing platform security and cost optimizations all the way to deploying complex system architectures such as Kubernetes. Most notably, we have been one of their trusted partners when it comes to their SAP infrastructure on AWS and have supported in many successful SAP system deployments.

AWS Client VPN - Access your Virtual Private Cloud

One of the most unknown options to access a VPC is Client VPN. Nearly all customers I am talking to are using a Bastion Host or similar to access services within their VPC. But what about direct access without any jumps in between? After reading this blog, you can create your own Client VPN.

Handling Errors and Retries in StepFunctions

“Everything fails all the time” has been preached to us by Werner Vogels for a few years now. Every engineer working on building and maintaining systems knows this to be true. Distributed systems come with their own kind of challenges, and one of the AWS services that help deal with those is AWS Step Functions. AWS Step Functions allow you to describe workflows as JSON and will execute those workflows for you. In this blog, we’ll explore what happens when things inevitably go wrong and the options the service offers to perform error handling and retries using an example application.