I have been debating for sometime where I start putting my new projects and potentially move some of my blogs so I can start using some CDNs and one of my thoughts was AWS. I think you can get away with the free tier but it does involve some work. I would also want a few blogs on one server too so that makes some of the management is easier along with cost benefit!
I highly suggest you do look at AWS Lightsail as its very competitive and the only reason I have not done it in this post is because at the time of writing you can not adjust the AWS Lightsail Firewall rules for full automation with Terraform
I may also end up using Lightsail as the Plesk image can be built in the UK on this platform but again at time of writing this post I could not find the AMI within the marketplace for the UK region. The version I was using was available in North California called “Plesk Onyx on Ubuntu 16.04 (Web Admin Edition – FREE)” as this EC2 image attracts the free tier and also you do not pay for Plesk like the other versions. I also hear its good for up to 3 website but any more needs a bigger EC2 and you of course do not get any support!
I have the code based over here at GitHub if you wish to give it a go!
I also have a video with a step by step guide on how to do this
At some stage I want to work on more of the automation and scale along with the load balancing.
So recently I have been working on a solution for creating a way for some of our users during a POC to access AWS WorkSpaces with some HP T520 thin clients of which can run Windows 10 IOT, of which is a post in itself but I know this may well be more useful to people even doing this with traditional PCs and Windows 10. I am not going to cover launching this application in start up etc or via GPO as again I may do this in the other post but I found quite quickly that I couldn’t get the client to persist in full screen. So first I headed to Google and the AWS documentation and there was nothing at the time of writing this
I found this quite shocking so the engineer in me came out and so did my managers, quite quickly we found /fullscreen didn’t work and I thought hang on they love their APIs I wonder if -fullscreen works… Guess what its does! This is a great way to force it each time even if the user switches out especially on the thin clients with the write filters. There also appears to be another large list of switches of which I don’t have them all working but it does appear SSO might be on its way and forcing/passing through user credentials could be useful in some cases. If anyone gets these working do let me know!
I have done a video of this too and hope to keep working on an exportable GPO or PowerShell cmdlet that can turn old clients into Kiosks
