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Recently, I recertified my AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional (DOP-C02) certification by sitting for the exam for the third time. So, I extended my DevOps Pro certification to 9 years and the AWS Certified Developer – Associate and AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate certifications to 10 years. It was a long marathon.

You need to recertify your AWS certifications in every three years. Although it was my third exam for this certification, it was still hard, and I learned new things during preparation. So, let me give you some insights about the exam coverage, how I prepared, and how online proctoring went with Pearson Vue.

Continue reading the AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional for the Third Time! blog post.

AWS CodeArtifact enables you to store your custom packages or fetch packages from public package registries and use them in your software development process. If you use AWS CodeBuild to build your code, you can make CodeBuild retrieve the packages required for your build or test commands from your CodeArtifact repository on AWS instead of public Internet registries.

In this post, I will introduce you to AWS CodeArtifact and provide an example of using it with AWS CodeBuild to build an Angular application.

Continue reading the Using AWS CodeArtifact with AWS CodeBuild: An Angular Build Example blog post.

In AWS IAM, permission policies play a crucial role in securely controlling access to your AWS environment. You can attach three types of permission policies to your identities: AWS-managed, customer-managed, and inline policies. In most cases, AWS recommends using managed policies over inline policies, especially customer-managed policies created from AWS-managed policies. However, there may also be cases for inline policies. In this post, we will quickly explore IAM’s permission policies to help you decide which is best for you.

By the way, we will only talk about AWS IAM’s identity-based permission policies in this post. The resource-based trust policies used in IAM roles, in which you specify the principals you trust to assume a role, will be out of the scope of this post. So, when we use the ‘policy’ term below, it will only refer to an IAM permission policy: AWS-managed, customer-managed, or inline. Then, let’s begin.

So, when you attach a policy to an identity (a user, group of users, and a role), that policy determines whether to allow or deny access to your AWS resources. Hence, with security threats in mind, choosing the right policy type for your needs is essential, as well as granting the least privilege. But you wouldn’t want to increase the management overhead while doing this, right?

Each IAM policy type has its use cases. So, let’s analyze each one to see what features it offers.

Continue reading the A Quick Overview of IAM Permission Policies: AWS-Managed, Customer-Managed, and Inline Policies blog post.

When I first used AWS back in 2013, I remember missing some free-tier benefits in my first year. I was developing an app with Ruby on Rails and read some fancy blog posts about how another VPS provider performs better than AWS, and I didn’t use EC2 or RDS at the start. I had to manage my servers and MariaDB databases myself. Even though that Linux administration experience helped me become a DevOps engineer today and better understand AWS’s benefits, my life would have been easier then, even with fewer costs. So, the AWS free tier is a great offer, especially when starting to learn the cloud and AWS.

However, if you are new to AWS, understanding the exact coverage of the AWS free tier can be confusing. Besides, you may be concerned about encountering a surprise bill at the beginning of the following month. So, in this post, let’s discuss five of the most crucial things you need to know about the AWS free tier and how to avoid unexpected costs when benefiting from it.

Continue reading the 5 Things to Note About AWS Free Tier blog post.

In my AWS CDK with Python Step by Step course, I teach you to define your constructs from the ground up. You learn to specify your AWS resources through CDK constructs using Python’s object-oriented methods.

However, what if you need to use or reference an existing resource from your AWS account, such as a VPC? Can you import a resource to your AWS CDK app?

So, in this blog post, I will discuss how to import an existing resource as a CDK construct. But you cannot achieve this in environment-agnostic stacks. Hence, we will start with specifying targetted CDK environments for your CDK stacks.

Continue reading the Importing AWS Resources to CDK Apps with Python blog post.