AWS Demo

Simone Brunozzi:  Good morning. I'm so happy to be here today. And, I want to apologize, you were expecting a beautiful French lady on stage. Instead, you get this guy by the name Simone.

They say that a demo is worth a thousand words and what I'm gonna show you today is a demo that relates to Enterprise and Cloud. There is this habit that we use to think of Enterprise and Cloud as two separate worlds. We have usually the Internet in between, they are on the side of our slides, and even if there are great ways to connect them through VPN, a tunnel through the Internet, or even by using the AWS Direct connect, which is a great option, still we keep considering those two things as separate ones.

Instead, what I want to give you today is a demo that hopefully will change your perception about this. I decided to record the video, instead of showing you a live demo and the reason being, there are many parts and I wanted to take the relevant ones for the interest of time, so we show you some segments of a longer demo and, of course, they are recorded.

Let's start with number one, Authentication. This is the Identity and Access Management Dashboard. This is a service that lets you manage users, groups and roles and this is the EC2 admin role. This one lets your users do anything on EC2, but not on other services. Let's switch to Active Directory now. This is a list of our users. We want to give them, for example, EC2 admin rights. How can we programmatically do this? We could use the Amazon API's to write code for that, or we could use our partner Okta.

This is the Okta dashboard. You have to enter your AWS credentials, like in this case, just once, just the first time and then if you go on the People tab, you can see that this is list of people in our active directory environment. If you go into Brooks, you can see, very important, one of those groups named EC2 Admins. If you click on that group, there is a way, an easy way, through Okta, to enable this group to have specific AWS permissions through IAM, in this case EC2 admin rights, which means that nowwe can even forget about this tool. Go back to Active Directory. This is our list of users, that's Simone Brunozzi. We want to give him EC2 admin rights, so we open the group, we add Simone to this group, very easy. Find it on the Active Directory, click apply and after a few minute, changes will be applied to the systems.

I can just do a Windows login with this user. I can open a browser with the AWS Management Console set as our default page and automatically, I'm logged in into AWS with the right credentials, in this case EC2 admin rights. It's super straightforward, seamless and there's no need to do extra integration with it.