Docker Windows container for Pester Tests

I recently wrote an intro to unit testing your powershell modules with Pester, and I wanted to give a walk through for our method of running these unit tests inside of a Docker for Windows container.

AWS S3 Lifecycle Policies - Prep for Deep Archive

AWS recently released a new S3 storage class called Deep Archive. It's an archival data service with pretty low cost for data you need to hold onto, but don't access very often.

Deep Archive is about half the cost of Glacier at $0.00099 per GB per month, but you sacrifice the option to get your data back in minutes, your only retrieval option is hours.

Unit Testing PowerShell Modules with Pester

Pester is a unit testing framework for Powershell. There are some good tutorials for it on their github page, and a few other places, but I'd like to pull together some of the key motivating use cases I've found and a couple of the gotchas.

Graph Your RI Commitment Over Time (subtitle: HOW LONG AM I PAYING FOR THIS?!?!?)

In my last post I talked about distributing your committed RI spend over time. The goal being to avoid buying too many 1 year RIs (front loading your spend), and missing out on the savings of committing to 3 years, but not buying too many 3 year RIs (back loading your spend) and risking having a bill you have to foot if your organization has major changes.

Our RI Purchase Guidelines

I've talked about it a couple of times, but AWS's recommendation engine is free and borderline magic.

It's a part of AWS Cost Explorer and ingests your AWS usage data, and spits back reserved instance recommendations

Getting Started with AWS Reserved Instances

If you've been using AWS for a while you've probably built up some excess spend. The "pay as you go" nature of AWS is a double edged sword: It's easy to get a PoC up and running, but you can wind up with waste if you aren't disciplined with your cleanup.

Diving Into (and reducing) Your AWS Costs!

AWS uses a "pay as you go" model for most of it's services. You can start using them at any time, you often get a runway of free usage to get up to speed on the service, then they charge you for what you use. No contract negotiations, no figuring out bulk discounts, and you don't have to provision for max capacity.