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Amazon Route 53 offers domain registration services and if you would like to keep your domains together like I do, you can transfer your current domain names easily.

In the past, I bough some domains from GoDaddy and generally use Amazon Route 53 as my DNS service. It is time to renew some of our domains and I decided to move them to AWS as they are extended 1 year automatically after the transfer. This will allow me to manage my domain names, as well as the services behind them all together on AWS. I will describe the process as a reference. Read more at Transferring Domain Registrations from GoDaddy to Amazon Route 53 post.

AWS API Gateway provides us to develop our own RESTful APIs and trigger AWS Lambda functions upon HTTP requests. I often use this architecture in my serverless applications and developed many APIs for my clients. With the help of API Keys and Usage Plans, we can define maximum request quotas and manage request rates while sharing our API with others.

Although API keys can never be considered as a full security measure as we often store these keys in client applications calling the API, usage plans can provide us to limit the API access and be sure that usage does not exceed tresholds we define. Read more at Controlling API Usage with API Keys and Usage Plans on AWS API Gateway post.

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is the foundation service to manage security of your resources on AWS. Custom IAM policies feature allows us to define our own policies according to our needs instead of using AWS Managed Policies. Normally, it is a best practice to use managed policies whenever possible, because AWS updates them automatically when a new service is launched. However, assigning least privileges is the most important principle in terms of security and sometimes it is better to prepare custom policies.

Conditions in IAM policies allow us to tailor permissions and grant access to users if the resource meets specific conditions. In this post, I will show you how to use conditions in an IAM policy to grant users permissions to start/stop EC2 instances if the instance is in a specific availability zone. Read more at AWS IAM Policy Conditions and Restricting Access by Availability Zones post.

AWS Lambda allows us running code without maintaining servers and paying only for the resources allocated during the code run. In most cases, we do not need to run our Lambda function in a VPC and it is recommended not to run in a VPC in these situations as a best practice. Some of examples to these are sending emails using Amazon SES or accessing a DynamoDB table.

However, to access an RDS database in your Lambda function you have to run your function in the same VPC or in a VPC that has a peering connection to the VPC of your RDS instance. In this blog post I would like to discuss about running AWS Lambda functions in a VPC and accessing a RDS MySQL database. Read more at Running AWS Lambda Functions in a VPC and Accessing RDS post.

When you decide to distribute your content stored in your Amazon S3 bucket with Amazon CloudFront, you most probably would like to avoid your users bypassing CloudFront and accessing them directly from Amazon S3.

In this blog post, I will demonstrate how you can utilize Origin Access Identities to restrict access to your S3 bucket on your Amazon CloudFront distributions. Read more at Restricting Amazon S3 Bucket Access on CloudFront Distributions post.