Reading time 8 min

Peter Jans

COVID-19 has forced a lot of people to temporarily stop working, or in our case, work from home. But what are our practices and tools we use to facilitate remote work? In this blog post, we’ll go over some tips and tricks about how we organize remote work. Communication is key When you’re not physically able to connect to others, communication in various formats and through various channels becomes even more important than it already was. Here’s a few ways we maximize our communication when working remotely. Get a clear view on the tasks at hand for your team, who’s working on what and what the priorities and due dates are. This provides clarity on what’s happening in the team. You can add some time registration elements on top to help you build statistical and graphical dashboards. Make sure that the tasks at hand are always up-to-date! Frequently organize team meetings , in which every team member can add topics at any time of the week. Set some time limits per subject, try to be prepared for your subject (with a proposal or clear context statement with a roundtable discussion). Start off every morning with a stand-up meeting in which you discuss what you’ve done the day before, what you’ll be doing today and whether you’ve encountered any problems. A stand-up usually takes only 10 to 15 minutes and helps you and your team communicate and feel connected. If you can you may reference a task that was set on the task board. Hold remote retrospective meetings . Typically held with the help of a video conferencing tool, its goal is to allow the team to reflect on the work done and determine how they can use that knowledge to improve moving forward. It’s a great way to duplicate your successes and learn from your failures. Retrospective meetings are, just like stand-ups, a way for you and your team to connect. If you’re working remotely, turning on the camera on your laptop or smartphone will help you respond and react to each other in a more real way. As people are less physically together it’s important to measure your team health , and get a good feeling of the overall team well being. Don’t forget that a lot of communication will be more point-to-point and less in groups. Reflect on the results together and define actionable items to work on for the upcoming period. You can potentially add a stand-down meeting to give everyone some time to reflect on the day and some challenges that were presented. This ensures that those challenges aren’t just forgotten the next day. Take your time to speak individually with team members via video calls, and not just through regular chat. This applies especially when you’re a team coach or manager and are working on short and long term objectives with your team members. Give them your feedback on a frequent basis and write them down together. This will help in being transparent and setting clear expectations. Open up a team channel for chatting seriously but also one for fun . It might be interesting for the whole team to hear you reflect out loud when you’re writing an email or chatting with somebody else. After all, when working next to each other in an office setting, there are usually lots of light-hearted conversations and opportunities to have a good laugh. The tips above mainly apply when you’re keeping in touch with your team members. But team members aren’t the only ones you need to keep in contact with. When communicating with customers in projects, have them collaborate closely on your task board, visual project dashboards and composed metrics. This will provide transparency for everyone who’s part of the project. Additionally, take out some extra time to reflect together on the status of the project. When communicating with end users in support desks , provide them with a clear helpdesk that streamlines all questions and incidents to provide simpler support. Both your end users and support desk agents gain by having a single channel for communication. When involved in software development projects, techniques as event storming, story mapping, pair programming, mob programming, sprint or weekly demo’s, story kick-off, epic kick-off, sprint planning, story writing, epic writing and many more will have to be applied more in detail to facilitate correct communication and avoid waste. All these techniques can also be applied when working in a remote context. For some tips on the right tools, check below! Build and expose the much needed dashboard to give clear insights on system availability, alerts, team, project or company performance Broadcast management communication transparently and frequently. Contact with your management might get more distant than ever, so do it more often and not only via text but via video. But most importantly: apply continuous improvement to all the points above. Some might work in your context, and others might not. Or new elements, particular to your concrete situation, might arise. Therefore, allow your communication practices to evolve. There is no final stage you can reach, and there’s always room for improvement! Tools are secondary Communication is key, but you need the tools to facilitate that communication. Below is a set of tools we have come to use over time. Task boards We have been adopting the Atlassian tools for more than 10 years now, so we have gotten used to define all of our work in tasks in Atlassian Jira and its marketplace apps . Not only for our software processes but also for HR, fleet management, marketing, finance, legal, project management, logistics, internal, helpdesks and so on. Some of our most used apps on top of that are Tempo, EazyBI, Structure, Portfolio, Dataplane, Insight and many more. Retrospective meetings There are quite a few tools available for remote retrospective meetings. At ACA, we prefer TeamRetro . The tool supports different formats for retros, but most of them are pretty standard. If you want some more uncommon formats for your retros, you’ll have to look elsewhere. You can sign up for a 30-day free trial. Whiteboards Whiteboards are easy to use in a face-to-face environment, but it’s a different story to do so online. Luckily, you can easily create interactive whiteboards in Zoom . Start a Zoom video call, share your screen with other participants and select ‘Whiteboard’. Then, click ‘Annotate’ and you can start drawing and writing! The whiteboard is interactive for all meeting participants. Afterwards, you can easily save the whiteboard by clicking the ‘Save’ button. Miro is another tool we can recommend when it comes to whiteboards. Miro allows you to create and collaborate on whiteboards, but also share these. Additionally, Miro includes a mind mapping tool. A Google JamBoard can also get you started collaborating with fellow team members. Video Conferencing For all kinds of video collaboration zoom.us is our tool of preference. It offers the possibility to join up to 49 people in one call, share screens and presentations, collaborate, pass control, and its chat options give tremendous flexibility when working together. Finally, its recording option is pretty powerful, making it easy to share a session with people who were unable to attend. Chatting When organizing or facilitating remote work, the ability to work together is crucial. There are a number of tools that can help you with this. Slack is well-known chat application that we use to help our teams communicate. You can chat directly, in teams or topic-oriented. Additionally, people can choose which channels they’d like to follow. Content management Confluence is a great tool to help teams organize their work and collaborate. Confluence is particularly great when working remotely because it inspires conversation as well: it encourage everyone to share announcements, strengthen company culture, and give/get instant feedback. Plus the collaborative editing features are really powerful, try them! Confluence also serves as our main channel for internal blog posts and spreading information throughout the organization. Additionally, we make extensive use of Google Apps for their co-creation functionalities. For example, Google Documents when creating blog posts like this one or Google slides when preparing and sharing presentations. DevOps We combine tools and techniques like BitBucket , Jenkins and Jira to have everyone work in a similar way (test, code, validate, pull request) so that handing over work and releasing it happens in the same way as many open source projects do (since those often also work with people remote and in different time zones). What about performance? P = f(p,e). Performance is a function of a person and their environment. Is working remotely more or less productive for someone? Often, working remotely means you’re more productive due to less interrupts. However, these are unprecedented times, so it’s not fair to make a comparison at this moment. We are but human and are overwhelmed by the news, the current situation and any personal feelings that might trouble our minds and distract us. Regardless of that aspect, here are some tips that can apply when working from home: Treat yourself for some fresh air and getting up from time to time for a short break. Having a quieter environment and a serious backlog might drain your resources faster than normally. Structurally or during a longer time, working remotely might give a feeling of loneliness or being less interactive. Don’t hesitate to free your mind for a second by talking to your family, pets or house members. Take a step back from time to time and reflect on the next things to do. Techniques as Getting Things Done ( GTD by David Allen ) might help. Make a clear agreement on working hours and end your working day as you would do normally to keep work and personal stuff separated. Get yourself a quiet and well-lit space with a comfortable desk and chair, and possibly a second screen. Keep this space clean and organized. A view outdoors will always allow you to have a much needed distraction from your computer screen. Some final tips Use threads instead of new chatlines in chat apps to avoid endless scrolls in channels. Promote the use of collaborative editing, it really works and is much more fun to do! If you’re having troubles with your video feeds, check the upload connection speed of your internet provider and possible extensive usage of family members at the same time such as Netflix and YouTube. Set a custom background in video chats to brighten up your video feed and put a smile on your team members face. Hold video calls with your team without a particular goal, just to chat and work as if you’re still sitting next to each other. Some external references that also contain good information: Atlassian remote work tips Tips for Managing Performance Remotely Time magazine: It's Hard to Make Remote Work Actually Work How to Pivot to Remote Work During the Coronavirus Emergency FDN: loosened telework requirements amid coronavirus spread Atlassian working from home tips Trello's blog posts on remote work

Reading time 5 min

Peter Jans

Like every year, Amazon held its AWS re:Invent 2021 in Las Vegas. While we weren’t able to attend in person due to the pandemic, as an AWS Partner we were eager to follow the digital event. Below is a quick rundown of our highlights of the event to give you a summary in case you missed it! AWS closer to home AWS will build 30 new ‘ Local Zones ’ in 2022, including one in our home base: Belgium. AWS Local Zones are a type of infrastructure deployment that places compute, storage, database, and other select AWS services close to large population and industry centers. The Belgian Local Zone should be operational by 2023. Additionally, the possibilities of AWS Outposts have increased . The most important change is that you can now run far more services on your own server delivered by AWS. Quick recap: AWS Outposts is a family of fully managed solutions delivering AWS infrastructure and services to virtually any on-premises or edge location for a consistent hybrid experience. Outposts was previously only available in a 42U Outposts rack configuration. From now on, AWS offers a variety of form factors, including 1U and 2U Outposts servers for when there’s less space available. We’re very tempted to get one for the office… AWS EKS Anywhere was previously announced, but is now a reality! With this service, it’s possible to set up a Kubernetes cluster on your own infrastructure or infrastructure from your favorite cloud provider, while still managing it through AWS EKS. All the benefits of freedom of choice combined with the unified overview and dashboard of AWS EKS. Who said you can’t have your cake and eat it too? Low-code to regain primary focus With Amplify Studio , AWS takes the next step in low-code development. Amplify Studio is a fully-fledged low-code generator platform that builds upon the existing Amplify framework. The platform allows users to build applications through drag and drop with the possibility of adding custom code wherever necessary. Definitely something we’ll be looking at on our next Ship-IT Day! Machine Learning going strong(er) Ever wanted to start with machine learning, but not quite ready to invest some of your hard-earned money? With SageMaker Studio Lab , AWS announced a free platform that lets users start exploring AI/ML tools without having to register for an AWS account or leave credit card details behind. You can try it yourself for free in your browser through Jupyter notebooks ! Additionally, AWS announced SageMaker Canvas : a visual, no-code machine learning capability for business analysts. This allows them to get started with ML without having extensive experience and get more insights in data. The third chapter in the SageMaker saga consists of SageMaker Ground Truth Plus . With this new service, you hire a team of experts to train and label your data, a traditionally very labor intensive process. According to Amazon, customers can expect to save up to 40% through SageMaker Ground Truth Plus. There were two more minor announcements: the AI ML Scholarschip Program , a free program for students to get to know ML tools, and Lex Automated Chatbot Designer , which lets you quickly develop a smart chatbot with advanced natural language processing support. Networking for everyone Tired of less than optimal reception or a slow connection? Why not build your own private 5G network? Yep: with AWS Private 5G , Amazon delivers the hardware, management and sim cards for you to set up your very own 5G network. Use cases (besides being fed up with your current cellular network) include warehouses or large sites (e.g. a football stadium) that require low latency, excellent coverage and a large bandwidth. The best part? Customers only pay for the end user’s usage of the network. Continuing the network theme, there’s now AWS Cloud WAN . This service allows users to build a managed WAN (Wide Area Network) to connect cloud and on-premise environments with a central management UI on a network components level as well as service level. Lastly, there’s also AWS Workspaces Web . Through this service, customers can grant employees safe access to internal website and SaaS applications. The big advantage here is that information critical to the company never leaves the environment and doesn’t leave any traces on workstations, thanks to a non-persistent web browser. Kubernetes anyone? No AWS event goes without mentioning Kubernetes, and AWS re:Invent 2021 is no different. Amazon announced two new services in the Kubernetes space: AWS Karpenter and AWS Marketplace for Containers Anywhere . With AWS Karpenter, managing autoscaling Kubernetes infrastructure becomes both simpler and less restrictive. It takes care of automatically starting compute when the load of an application changes. Interestingly, Karpenter is fully open-source, a trend which we’ll see more and more according to Amazon. AwS Marketplace for Containers Anywhere is primarily useful for customers who’ve already fully committed to container managed platforms. It allows users to search, subscribe and deploy 3rd party Kubernetes apps from the AWS Marketplace in any Kubernetes cluster, no matter the environment. IoT updates There have been numerous smaller updates to AWS’s IoT services, most notably to: GreenGrass SSM , which now allows you to securely manage your devices using AWS Systems Manager Amazon Monitron to predict when maintenance is required for rotating parts in machines AWS IoT TwinMaker , to simply make Digital Twins of real-world systems AWS IoT FleetWise , whichs helps users to collect vehicle data in the cloud in near-real time. Upping the serverless game In the serverless landscape, AWS announced serverless Redshift , EMR , MSK , and Kinesis . This enables to set up services while the right instance type is automatically linked. If the service is not in use, the instance automatically stops. This way, customers only pay for when a service is actually being used. This is particularly interesting for experimental services and integrations in environments which do not get used very often. Sustainability Just like ACA Group’s commitment to sustainability , AWS is serious about their ambition towards net-zero carbon by 2040. They’ve developed the AWS Customer Carbon Footprint tool, which lets users calculate carbon emissions through their website . Other announcements included AWS Mainframe Modernization , a collection of tools and guides to take over existing mainframes with AWS, and AWS Well-Architected Framework , a set of design principles, guidelines, best practices and improvements to validate sustainability goals and create reports. We can't wait to start experimenting with all the new additions and improvements announced at AWS re:Invent 2021. Thanks for reading! Discover our cloud hosting services

Reading time 3 min

Peter Jans

The world is rapidly changing, both from a technological and environmental point of view. Often, these challenges go hand in hand. For example, through the push towards electric vehicles, smart homes and sustainable energy. But while there has been a longstanding focus on the automotive, manufacturing and agricultural industries, there is no pathway to a cleaner environment without addressing the sizable energy consumption of data centers and cloud computing. The carbon footprint of cloud computing According to the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) latest report , data centers around the world in 2021 used 220 to 320 TWh of electricity, which is around 0.9 to 1.3% of the global electricity demand. In addition, global data transmission networks consumed 260-340 TWh, or 1.1 to 1.4% of electricity. Combined, data centers and transmission networks contribute to 0.9% of energy-related emissions. While these may seem fairly low numbers, the demand for data services is rising exponentially. Global internet traffic surged over the past decade, an evolution that accelerated during the pandemic. Since 2010, the number of internet users across the world has more than doubled and global internet traffic has increased 15-fold , or 30% per year . This means that the carbon footprint of cloud computing is something all companies, large or small, must consider. But what can you do without sacrificing the computing power needed to support innovation and deliver goods and services as promised? Amazon Web Services (AWS) While cloud computing also comes with a footprint, it offers a much more eco-friendly way to operate your IT systems than local servers. That’s why we believe a cloud-first approach is key to make your business more sustainable. Especially when cloud-based technologies are powered with renewable energy. That’s why ACA Group carefully chooses its partnerships and evaluates the environmental impact of those partners. In this context, we have selected AWS as a cloud provider. Combined with our flexible Kubernetes setups, it allows us to choose for the least amount of carbon emissions while still meeting (and even exceeding) the expectations of our customers. It shows that cloud computing needs do not come at the planet’s expense. But why AWS? As the world’s most prominent cloud provider, Amazon Web Services is focused on efficiency and continuous innovation across its global infrastructure. In fact, they are well on their way to powering their operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025. Amazon recently became the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy ; Their investments supply enough electricity to power 3 million US households for a year. Efficient computing Creating clean energy sources is essential, but no less important is rethinking how computing resources are allocated. In a cloud efficiency report, 451 Research showed that AWS’s infrastructure is 3.6 times more energy efficient than the median of U.S. enterprise data centers they surveyed. Amazon attributes this greater efficiency to, among other things, removing the central uninterruptible power supply from their data design and integrating small battery packs and custom power supplies into the server racks. Tese changes combined reduce energy conversion loss by about 35%. The servers themselves are more efficient as well: their Graviton2 CPUs are extremely power- efficient and offer better performance per watt than any other processor currently in use in Amazon data centers. AWS offers unlimited access to cloud computing and services. While this comes at a price, efficient use of resources not only reduces costs, but also indirectly reduces carbon emissions. How can you achieve this? Build applications that are resource-efficient. Consume resources with the lowest possible footprint. Maximize the output on resources used. Reduce the amount of data and distance traveled across the network. Use resources just-in-time. ➡️ Curious how we at ACA Group set up our cloud stacks for maximum sustainability without giving up power, availability and flexibility? Talk to us here !

Reading time 6 min

Peter Jans

AWS Config is a service that enables you to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your AWS resources. This can be used for: security: validate security best practices on your AWS Account compliance: report on deviations on configuration for AWS resources based upon best practices or architectural principles and guidelines efficiency: report on lost or unused resources in your AWS Account In this blog post, I’d like to detail how to monitor your cloud resources with this tool. This first part discusses AWS Config account setup, enabling notifications when resources are not compliant, and deployment. Why use AWS Config? AWS is the main cloud platform we use at ACA. We manage multiple accounts in AWS to host all sorts of applications for ourselves and for our customers. Over the years, we set up more and more projects in AWS. This led to a lot of accounts being created, which in turn use a lot of cloud resources. Naturally, this means that keeping track of all these resources becomes increasingly challenging as well. AWS Config helped us deal with this challenge. We use it to inventorize and monitor all the resources in our entire AWS organization . It also allows us to set compliance rules for our resources that need to be conform in every account. For example: an Elastic IP should not be left unused or an EC2 security group should not allow all incoming traffic without restrictions. This way, we’re able to create a standard for all our AWS accounts. Having AWS Config enabled in your organization gives us a couple of advantages. We always have an up-to-date inventory of all the resources in our accounts. It allows to inspect the change history of all our resources 24/7. It gives us the possibility to create organization rules and continuously check if our resources are compliant. If that’s not the case, we instantly get a notification. Setting up AWS Config for a single account In this first part of my AWS Config blog, I want to show how to set up AWS Config in a single account. In a future blog post, I’ll explain more about you can do this for an entire AWS organization. The image below shows an overview of the setup in a single account, containing the AWS Config recorder, the AWS Config rules, and the S3 bucket. The AWS Config recorder is the main component of the set-up. You can turn on the default recorder in the AWS console. By default, it will record all resource types. You can find more information about all the available resource types on this page . When you start recording, all the the AWS resources are stored in the S3 bucket as configuration items. Recording these configuration items is not free. At the point of writing it costs $0.003 per recorded configuration item. This cost is generated when the configuration item is first recorded or when something changes to it or one of its relationships . In the settings of the AWS Config recorder, you can also specify how long these configuration items should be stored in the S3 bucket. The AWS Config rules are the most important part of your setup. These rules can be used as compliancy checks to make sure the resources in your account are configured as intended. It’s possible to create custom rules or choose from a large set of AWS managed rules . In our setup at ACA, we chose to only use AWS managed rules since they fitted all our needs. In the image below, you can see one of the rules we deployed. Just like recording configuration items, running rule evaluations costs money. At the moment of writing this is $0.001 for the first 100.000 rule evaluations per region, $.0008 from 100.000 – 500.000 and after that $.0005. There are a lot of rules available with different benefits to your AWS account. These are some of the AWS managed rules we configured: Rules that improve security AccessKeysRotated: checks if the Access keys of an IAM user are rotated within a specified amount of days IamRootAccessKeyCheck: checks if a root account has access keys assigned to it, which isn’t recommended S3BucketServerSideEncryptionEnabled: checks if default encryption for a S3 bucket is enabled Rules that detect unused resources (cost reduction) Ec2VolumeInuseCheck: checks if an EBS volume is being used EipAttached: checks if an Elastic IP is being used Rules that detect resource optimizations VpcVpn2TunnelsUp: checks if a VPN connection has two tunnels available Setting up notifications when resources are not compliant AWS Config rules check configuration items. If a configuration item doesn’t pass the rule requirements, it is marked as ‘non compliant’. Whenever this happens, you want to be notified so you can take the appropriate actions to fix it. In the image below, you can see the way we implemented the notifications for our AWS Config rules. To start with notifications, CloudTrail should be enabled and there should be a trail that logs all activity in the account. Now CloudWatch is able to pick up the CloudTrail events. In our setup, we created 5 CloudWatch event rules that send notifications according to priority. This makes it possible for us to decide what the priority level of the alert for each AWS Config rule should be. The image below shows an example of this. In the ‘Targets’ section, you can see the SNS topic which receives the messages of the CloudWatch event rule. Opsgenie has a separate subscription for each of the SNS topics (P1, P2, P3, P4 P5). This way, we receive notifications when compliance changes happen and also see the severity by looking at the priority level from our Opsgenie alert. Deploying your AWS Config At ACA, we try to always manage our AWS infrastructure with Terraform. This is no different for AWS Config. This is our deployment workflow: We manage everything AWS Config related in Terraform. Here’s an example of one of the AWS Config rules in Terraform, in which the rule_identifier attribute value can be found in the documentation of the AWS Config managed rules: resource "aws_config_config_rule" "mfa_enabled_for_iam_console_access" { name = "MfaEnabledForIamConsoleAccess" description = "Checks whether AWS Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) is enabled for all AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users that use a console password. The rule is compliant if MFA is enabled." rule_identifier = "MFA_ENABLED_FOR_IAM_CONSOLE_ACCESS" maximum_execution_frequency = "One_Hour" excluded_accounts = "${var.aws_config_organization_rules_excluded_accounts}" } The Terraform code is version controlled with Git. When the code needs to be deployed, Jenkins does a checkout of the Git repository and deploys it to AWS with Terraform. Takeaway With AWS Config we’re able to get more insights in our AWS cloud resources. AWS Config improves our security , avoids keeping resources around that are not being used and makes sure our resources are being configured in an optimal way. Besides these advantages, it also provides us with an inventory of all our resources and their configuration history, which we can inspect at any time. This concludes this blog post on the AWS Config topic. In a future part I want to explain how to set it up for an AWS organization. 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