Overview aws-vault is a tool for storing your AWS credentials in your system keychain instead of as a plain text file on-disk. Credentials and other secrets (including your various system passwords) are stored inside your system keychain. They are encrypted, and cannot easily be stolen by a rogue script or application. By keeping your AWS credentials in your system keychain, they are available to you when you are logged in, unavailable when you are logged out, and provide an important layer of security that the standard plain text storage method does not.

It’s been a while since I’ve written about code, so I thought I’d post this little AWS-related tip for OS X and Linux users. If you have the Unified AWS CLI Tools configured, you can add these functions to your Bash profile (typically either ~/.bash_profile or ~/.profile) to enable you to SSH into an instance by “Name” tag, or simply lookup the IP address or DNS hostname. hostname_from_instance <instance-name> ip_from_instance <instance-name> ssh-aws <instance-name> Bash code function hostname_from_instance() { echo $(aws ec2 describe-instances --filters "{\"Name\":\"tag:Name\", \"Values\":[\"$1\"]}" --query='Reservations[0].

This is one of a few quick tutorials I’ve had sitting around on my hard drive for a while. I’m posting it now for the sake of anyone who may find these instructions useful. It’s important to note that these are the instructions you’d use for a standalone EC2 instance. If your app is low-traffic enough to only need a single server, a better option would be to leverage a single-instance Elastic Beanstalk environment which gives you more, better and simpler deployment options.

I learned at a relatively young age what makes a good password versus a bad password, and I’ve tried to always use these qualities in the passwords that I choose. The Problem Unfortunately, even with the best intentions, you inevitably end up re-using one or a few passwords across every single website you log into. Some people do things as dumb as using the name of their significant other. Or their pet. Or a birthdate. Or something else equally guessable by one of the many supercomputers that exist (whereby “supercomputer”, I mean pretty much any computer invented in the past 5–7 years).