Blog

Beyond the Bastion: Connecting to Your Resources in AWS

In a perfect world, there would never be a need to connect to your resources running on AWS. In the real world, it’s sometimes necessary to get your hands dirty and look at what’s happening on the actual machine, especially during development. This post dives into a few ways to connect your workstation to resources running inside a VPC. It started out as a how-to for using bastion hosts, but quickly expanded to look beyond the bastion.

Analyzing Glue Jobs with AWS X-Ray

It’s possible to analyze your Glue jobs using just the logs they produce. Possible. But it’s not a pleasant task: your log messages are buried in messages from the framework, and in the case of a distributed PySpark job they’ll be spread amongst multiple CloudWatch log streams. In this post I look at an alternative: AWS X-Ray, which captures and aggregates “trace segments” that monitor specific sections of your code. With X-Ray, you can easily see where your jobs are spending their time, and compare different runs.

Get started with AWS IoT Core with a MKR WiFi 1010, a MKR Env Shield and this starter project

Introduction Today’s small microcontrollers offer impressive functionality and provide an opportunity to replace older, more expensive software and hardware. Consider the case where a facility wants to have control over devices or equipment, with rules that evaluate telemetry from sensors and activate, deactivate or regulate equipment and other devices. Many large facilities have systems in place that rely on a global standard named BACNet. This protocol has been an ISO standard since 2004 and allows for different types of devices…

Friends Don’t Let Friends Use JSON (in their data lakes)

I’ve never been a JSON hater, but I’ve recently run into enough pain with JSON as a data serialization format that my feelings are edging toward dislike. However, JSON is a fact of life in most data pipelines, especially those that receive event-stream data from a third-party supplier. This post reflects on some of the problems that I’ve seen, and solutions that I’ve used

Twentieth Anniversary: Philadelphia Emerges as an Innovation Center

We’ve been celebrating Chariot Solutions’ 20-year anniversary this year with a series of lookbacks across specific industries, team members and types of technologies. But any reflection on the last two decades would be incomplete without a deep dive on the tech-related changes in our hometown of Philadelphia during that same span. The pre-Y2K tech scene here was very different, as evidenced by the top startups list for 1999 published by Philadelphia Business Journal technology reporter Peter Key. It was largely…

The look forward – one consultant’s view on tech trends in 2023

As 2022 comes to a close, here are some of the technologies, patterns and strategies I'm watching for 2023. This list is from my perspective, I'm sure if you poll others here at Chariot they'd have their own. The Big Serverless Push Watching the re:Invent keynote last month, you'd be hard pressed to miss Werner Vogels' central message: go all in on Serverless computing, and sure, it has an allure. With a few clicks or a small (?) CloudFormation script…

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