AWS Billing: Set an alarm to a cost threshold

Knowing about some details about the costs inside aws and some of the services (especially, that Docker, VPNs and Kubernetes are not included in the free trials)

• What services are free of charge? How to control your costs... (Part 1)
• Part (2)
• Part (3)

i set an alarm on my account, to get informed about new costs:

So move to "Cloudwatch" and there you have to choose "Alarms":

 Then "Create Alarm":

 And click on "select metric":

 Inside "select metric" click on "Billing" (at the bottom):

And select "Total Estimated Charge"

Select the Checkbox for USD and then "Select metric"

 After that you have to specify an exceed and an e-mail address:

 

If this is your first alarm you have to verify your e-mail:

 And if the confirmation is done, you will get:

Now the Dashboard shows:

And i got an e-mail with this alarm:

AWS: AWS Solutions Architect Associate - Practice

After reading the book AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Official Study Guide i decided to go for a online exam at https://aws.amazon.com/training/

I had to answer 25 question in about 30 minutes, which was quite exhausting. Only a few minutes after the exam i got the following mail:

Hmmm.
3.0 Specify Secure Applications and Architectures: 50%
An unconvincing result for this area, but with some more reading and more exercises i should get above 80%.

4.0 and 5.0 with 100%: Better than expected.

But is an overall score of 76% enough?
One day later inside my aws certification account the following line appeared:

;-)

Oracle VM Server x86: How to get a redundant network for the heartbeat

A while ago i played around with Oracle VM Manager

• Setting up an Oracle VM Manager
• Setting up an Oracle VM Server node 
• discovering a node, creating a pool and repository 
• Oracle VM Server: my first vm: Error: HVM guest support is unavailable
• Oracle VM Server x86: Creation of a virtual machine 
• Oracle VM Server: How to add ISO images to your repository  
• Oracle VM Server x86: Discovering a server/node + setting up a repository, server pool and networking

I was wondering, if i can setup a redundant network for the heartbeat on my virtualbox playground. My question was: Can i add an additional network and stripe the heartbeat over both networks or do i have to configure 2 network interfaces and use bonding.

So let's start:
Open the OVM Manager and go to "Networking":

and hit the green plus to add a network:

Just hit next and provide a name and toggle the checkbox "heartbeat":

Then expand the tree to the new NIC and choose it:

Then mark the row and hit next:

For my use case  i did not add any VLANs - and after all the heartbeat is striped over both networks:

 

But this is not really true:

Message:	OVMRU_001079E Cannot add Ethernet device: eth1 on oraclevm, to network: hearbeat, because server: oraclevm, already has cluster network: 192.168.178.0. [Sat Nov 24 11:39:39 EST 2018]

Hmmm. This means the OVM Manager shows two hooks, but the second one does not work.

After some investigation: The network "heartbeat" was created but the port (eth1) was missing. 

So i removed the "Cluster Heartbeat" and then i added the port eth1 including the checkbox "Virtual Machines".

The ovm server showed up eth1:

# ifconfig |grep ^[a-z,0-9]
108e472f6e Link encap:Ethernet  Hardware Adresse 08:00:27:43:D9:4C  
bond0     Link encap:Ethernet  Hardware Adresse 08:00:27:61:51:35  
c0a8b200  Link encap:Ethernet  Hardware Adresse 08:00:27:61:51:35  
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  Hardware Adresse 08:00:27:61:51:35  
eth1      Link encap:Ethernet  Hardware Adresse 08:00:27:43:D9:4C  
lo        Link encap:Lokale Schleife  

But adding "Cluster Heartbeat" once again results in a job, which was in status "running" forever.

Conclusion: You should never stripe the "Cluster Heartbeat" over more than one network!

AWS: Logging? CloudTrail!

Today took a look at CloudTrail:

 

CloudTrails provides a view into user activities, by recording their API calls. On the AWS webpages you can find the following graphic:

So let's start and move to cloudtrail:

Inside the event history you will be provided with the following view:

Here you can see my efforts for the posting AWS: How to delete a static website via aws cli.
If you expand such an event, you get the following information:

• AWS region
• Error code (in this case "BucketNotEmpty")
• Source IP address
• Username
• ... 

The events will be stored for 90 days and can be downloaded via this button (right above the event table):

$ head -3 event_history.csv 
Event ID,Event time,User name,Event name,Resource type,Resource name,AWS access key,AWS region,Error code,Source IP address,Resources
5c0cd873-3cef-449c-9e6a-1809ba827ac1,"2018-11-24, 05:06:47 PM",root,TestEventPattern,,,,eu-west-1,,87.123.BBB.AAA,[]
dcd07bfa-780c-4640-9293-513c35b3db0a,"2018-11-24, 05:05:23 PM",root,ConsoleLogin,,,,us-east-1,,87.123.BBB.AAA,[]