Sometimes a business needs to structure account access on AWS in a way that ensures administrative isolation of workloads.

In this instance, it becomes necessary to create cross-account roles that establish and grant access between a trusting account and a trusted account by sharing temporary security credentials.

The trusting account contains the resources and services that need to be accessed by the users in the trusted account.

We will limit the scope of this article to only the granting of access to IAM user/group; external vendor and AWS service access will not be covered here.

A trust relationship is defined…

I got interviewed on radio not too long ago — how did I get here?

This year has brought some new and amazing experiences my way, I have attributed these to a wide range of other things and other people, but I also want to acknowledge another contributor that I have neglected for a while.

“Luck is when preparation meets opportunity”, so said a Roman philosopher — and Oprah Winfrey!

I previously blogged about my journey to becoming a Cloud engineer. This blog, as much as I had written it for myself, was also written for the person out there…

I like the following quote by one of the most influential strategy thinkers and no1 best-selling author of Strategy Execution, Jeroen De Flander: “Strategy is thinking about a choice and choosing to stick with your thinking”.

With the overwhelming need for businesses to migrate their applications to the Cloud as part of their digital transformation there has also been a sense of being overwhelmed when it comes to where to even begin with this cloud migration.

The major cloud service providers, and other technology bodies, have defined patterns that seek to be a guide to this cloud migration strategy.

AWS…

One of the overarching design principles of the AWS Well Architected Framework places strong focus on iteration, that your architecture will continuously evolve as you review what you have built — and as new services and features become available. It is one of the major reasons that Infrastructure-as-code (IaS) and CI/CD Pipelines are key for deployments.

Well, a new service was announced not too long ago — AWS recently announced DataSync which is their service that simplifies, automates and accelerates data transfer between on-premises storage systems and AWS storage services.

The DataSync architecture reminded me of an architecture (see very…

The usual cliché; I absolutely love to challenge myself. How else would this ex-Mainframe developer, turned Business Analyst end up 2x AWS Certified, working as a Cloud Engineer at one of the biggest banks in the sub-Saharan Africa.

My journey to being AWS Certified began almost 3 years ago. My ex-employer’s adoption of Cloud as a strategy and subsequent partnering with AWS presented a “new, shiny thing” that made such sense to me. Cloud is very central to digital transformation, ensuring that I didn’t get left behind was very exciting to me.

How did I learn AWS?

I mentioned earlier…

The AWS Well Architected Framework is AWS’s offering to help builders build secure, high performing, resilient and efficient infrastructure for their applications.

This framework consists of 5 Pillars — and the following general design principles are overarching and repeated throughout all of these 5 Pillars:

• Stop guessing capacity needs >>> pay only for what you use
• Automate everything >>> use infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD Pipelines for your deployments
• Test at scale >>> test on a replica of production
• Game days >>> practice, practice, practice for disasters

So what are these 5 Pillars:

• Operational Excellence
• Cost Optimization
• Reliability
• Performance Efficiency
• Security

Now…