RDS snapshots can be unencrypted or they can be encrypted at rest. Today, best practice is to use encryption-at-rest on your RDS instances and clusters, and to encrypt your RDS snapshots. When you create an RDS snapshot from an RDS instance or cluster, the resulting snapshot will be encrypted if the source instance or cluster is encrypted. But if the source is not encrypted, then your RDS snapshot is not encrypted. When you create an RDS snapshot, you are not given the option to encrypt it.

RDS DB snapshots are snapshots created from Amazon RDS DB instances. Those being MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server. Amazon Aurora also has snapshots, however, those are considered “cluster snapshots” and are handled differently.

Software configuration management (SCM) is a set of processes, policies, and tools that organize the development process. The goal of SCM is to improve the speed of and quality by catching errors early and enabling quick fixes when they occur. Understand how to define SCM and discuss how to accomplish it.

As companies, big or small, move into the cloud, it’s becoming more and more important to ensure that data is protected. There are numerous options for data resilience, including (but not limited to), Amazon EBS and Amazon S3. What you choose to use depends on your business requirements. Amazon EBS volumes are supposed to be redundant within an availability zone, however they have been known to fail, both due to technical issues, and by human error.

The AWS Elastic Beanstalk Console currently allows you to change between minor platform versions (e.g. from 2017.09 v2.6.1 running PHP 7.0 to 2017.09 v2.6.2 running PHP 7.0), but doesn’t support changes between major versions (e.g. from 2017.09 v2.6.2 running PHP 7.0 to 2017.09 v2.6.2 running PHP 7.1).

Deploying an application can be an overwhelming process. Get our step-by-step application deployment process and checklist to make this daunting task a little more manageable.

We’ve been hard at work for over 15 years building software to help you collaborate better. But if you work on an IT or customer support team, you know it takes more than the right software to build a culture of collaboration between your service teams and dev teams. You also need to have a set of best practices to help you use your collaboration tools to their fullest potential.

On January 3, 2018, the Meltdown and Spectre CPU architecture flaws were announced to the world. Due to early leaks, the announcement was made roughly a week earlier than planned. These bugs are easily the largest vulnerabilities announced in the last decade and require a complete reassessment of microprocessor architectures, and how software and hardware interact.

The thought of implementing DevOps can be intimidating and it's not easy. However, the results can be staggering and the metrics are easy to measure. Here are real-world examples of DevOps being implemented and how it positively impacted a company.

Most likely you have heard about Spectre and Meltdown by now. It’s all over the news. As an IT or DevOps engineer, it’s now your job to patch your EC2 instance operating systems. This task can be “fun” if you need to SSH/RDP into every EC2 instance and apply patches. Or, it can be truly fun if you decide to use AWS Systems Manager to apply patches to your OS.