I'm looking for a service or third party solution that allows for granting temporary access to an IAM user (or group) to one or more services in an AWS account. The example I have is there is an outage in a production account, and I would like to grant temporary access to developers/sys admins to resolve the issue. Under normal circumstances, they would not have access to this particular service/account. Ideally, I would like this to me a managed off the shelf solution vs something like STS, which would require quite a bit of configuration. Example, a system outage occurs for unknown reasons in a production account that the on call SRE does not normally have access to. A manager or lead should quickly be able to temporarily escalate privileges for the user until the "firefight" is resolved.

I am looking for recommendations on how to skill up to be a dedicated DevOps Engineer. I have always wanted to work on Development related projects as I love coding but unfortunately I have never got the chance. I have previously worked on freelance projects using .Net and PHP and I am certified in Java SE but I have never used it. My work experience incorporates being in system and application administration. Mostly I am a senior now in this field so a switch to Development is not preferred as I would have to start over as a junior. However I think DevOps will be perfect for me but I need to know what I need to study to fill the gaps in my knowledge to be a good dedicated DevOps engineer (preferably the part about writing automation and tools). Please recommend what should I study, for example I heard Python and Perl and Ruby are very good for DevOps but what else should I start with and what is the mandatory skills that i need to cover first? My current skill set: Sys. Admin - Unix (HP-UX, Solaris) and Linux (Ubuntu, Red hat, CentOS) Administration - Middleware Technologies administration (WebLogic, Apache-Tomcat, WebSphere, MQ) - Bash/Shell Scripting - Web server configuration and administration - Excellent knowledge of common database systems (SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, etc.) - Web services and Integrations SOAP/REST/API - Oracle Business Intelligence Suite (OBIEE, DAC, Informatica) - ITSM Remedy Development and Administration. - SAP Business Object (Analytics). - Splunk - Service Center –ITIL-enabled IT service Management - Strong understanding of Web Application technologies. Developer - Expert Development skills in Microsoft Visual Basic. - Excellent Development Skills in Java SE. - Microsoft .Net Development - MS SharePoint development. - Expert in MS Office with Expert knowledge in Macros and Automation across all MS office Applications. - Intermediate PHP development (CakePHP)

"SRE is what happens when you ask a software engineer to design an operations team." – Site Reliability Engineering Since Google's Site Reliability Engineering Book was released, on more than one occasion I have been told that SRE is an extension of the existing Operations or Application Support model. We've had a couple of questions that defined differences between Sys. Admins, DevOps Engineers and Site Reliability Engineers: - What is the difference between Sysadmin and DevOps Engineer? - What is the difference between SRE and DevOps? - What could be a valid definition of DevOps to introduce it to a novice? However none of these questions or their answers describe the differences between a Systems Administrator and a Site Reliability Engineer. In broader terms: what are the key differences between Google's practice of Site Reliability Engineering and the traditional separated Development and Operations functions within a business.

I had a perfect server, it was so pretty and rock solid and so I named it Petra. It was perfect in every way, everything was configured and tuned just right, it had perfect 100% service record and 753 days of uptime. I've spent a lot of time and effort making sure it run so well. No other server in the company had been this good. But last night this evil monster crashed my server for no reason. Of course I was notified at 2am and it took me until morning to get it up and running and everything configured and tuned up, but I'm afraid it is not going to be as good as before. It might take weeks before it is back to it's former glory. Now my uptime is gone, I don't have even measly three 9s and who knows what this will do to my reputation. Who is this Chaos Monkey and why did he do that to my server and why is he trying to ruin me?