AWS Control Tower Basics

What is AWS Control Tower? Service that sets up and governs a secure, multi-account AWS environment based on best practices. Automates the creation of a landing zone. What It Sets Up AWS Organizations (account structure) Identity Center (SSO) Guardrails (preventive + detective + proactive controls) Log Archive account (centralized logging) Audit account (security/compliance) Account Factory (provision new accounts) ┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ Management Account │ │ └── Organizations │ │ ├── Security OU │ │ │ ├── Log Archive Account │ │ │ └── Audit Account │ │ └── Workloads OU │ │ ├── Dev Account │ │ └── Prod Account │ └─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ Landing Zone A well-architected, multi-account AWS environment. It’s the architecture pattern, not a service. ...

December 31, 2025 · 11 min · Ren Nishino

EKS & Kubernetes Basics - Difference from ECS

What is Kubernetes? Container orchestration system. Automatically manages many containers across many servers. Problems it solves Decide which server runs which container Restart crashed containers Scale up/down based on load Route traffic to healthy containers Roll out updates without downtime Key Terms Term Meaning Cluster Entire Kubernetes system (Control Plane + all Nodes) Node Server (physical/VM) that runs containers Pod Smallest deployable unit. One or more containers sharing storage/network Control Plane The “brain” that makes decisions (scheduling, monitoring, scaling) ┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ Kubernetes Cluster │ │ │ │ You tell Kubernetes: "I want 3 copies of my web app running" │ │ │ │ │ ▼ │ │ ┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ │ │ Control Plane (the brain) │ │ │ │ - Receives your request │ │ │ │ - Decides which servers have capacity │ │ │ │ - Schedules containers onto servers │ │ │ │ - Monitors health, restarts failed containers │ │ │ └─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ │ │ │ │ │ ┌───────────────┼───────────────┐ │ │ ▼ ▼ ▼ │ │ ┌─────────────────┐ ┌─────────────────┐ ┌─────────────────┐ │ │ │ Node 1 │ │ Node 2 │ │ Node 3 │ │ │ │ ┌───────────┐ │ │ ┌───────────┐ │ │ ┌───────────┐ │ │ │ │ │ Pod │ │ │ │ Pod │ │ │ │ Pod │ │ │ │ │ │ (web app) │ │ │ │ (web app) │ │ │ │ (web app) │ │ │ │ │ └───────────┘ │ │ └───────────┘ │ │ └───────────┘ │ │ │ └─────────────────┘ └─────────────────┘ └─────────────────┘ │ └─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ What is EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service)? AWS-managed Kubernetes Control Plane + your worker nodes ...

December 29, 2025 · 23 min · Ren Nishino

AWS RDS, Aurora, and EBS Storage Basics

What is RDS? Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) is a platform that manages databases. What RDS handles: Instance provisioning Backups Patching Monitoring Failover Database Engines Database software that runs on RDS. All use SQL but built by different organizations with different designs. Engine Built by License Characteristics MySQL Oracle (originally Sun) Open source (GPL) Simple, fast, web-focused PostgreSQL Open source community Open source Feature-rich, standards-compliant Oracle Oracle Corporation Commercial (paid) Enterprise, everything built-in Auto Increment ID syntax differences: ...

December 27, 2025 · 7 min · Ren Nishino