How Many Availability Zones Do You Need?
Different numbers of availability zones are appropriate for different workloads. This post helps you pick an appropriate number for your needs.
Three Approaches to Deploying Lambdas
“Traditional” deployment patterns separate the application from its infrastructure. Lambda deployments turn this model on its head, binding the infrastructure tightly to the running code. This can be a challenge, especially when developing in a team: it is all too easy for one developer to accidentally overwrite another’s work. In this post I look at several deployment options, and how they impact a development team.
Building and Deploying Lambdas from a Docker Container
In my last post, I looked at how you could package your Lambda as a Docker image. In this post, I show how you can use the base Amazon images to build a “traditional” Lambda and ensure that it has libraries that are appropriate for the Lambda runtime environment.
Getting Started with Lambda Container Images
Lambda Container Images were announced at re:Invent 2020, providing a new way to build and deploy Lambda functions. They arrived just in time to solve an annoying build problem for me, so got my attention. And there weren’t any tutorials floating around when I first Googled, so I figured it was worth writing one. But … Read More
Running the SAM CLI on Linux
I find the SAM (Serverless Application Model) CLI extremely frustrating to use on Linux, starting with installation. But this week I learned two things that simplify both installation and operation. I’m passing them on in the hopes that they’ll be useful to you as well.
RDS Database Authentication with Spring Boot: Part 2, IAM Authentication
Frequent database password changes are a best practice, because they reduce the “blast radius” if compromised. However, restarting your applications in order to pick up the latest password can be onerous in a large deployment. This post describes how to implement a custom Postgres datasource that calls on IAM to generate a password whenever your application opens a connection to the database.
RDS Database Authentication with Spring Boot: Part 1, Secrets Manager
Frequent database password changes are a best practice, because they reduce the “blast radius” if compromised. However, restarting your applications in order to pick up the latest password can be onerous in a large deployment. This post describes how to use AWSLabs database driver that retrieves the current password from Secrets Manager whenever your application opens a connection to the database.
Secrets Manager vs Parameter Store
AWS gives you two ways to store application configuration: Secrets Manager and Systems Manager Parameter Store. Both can store arbitrary configuration data. Both use IAM (Identity and Access Management) policies to control access. Both can encrypt the data. So which should you pick?
Accounts as a Service: Why we have 50+ AWS accounts, and why you should too
One of the chief benefits of cloud computing is the ability to experiment. This talk is about how we use “transient” to allow developer experimentation while preventing abuse.
Two Buckets and a Lambda: a pattern for file processing
This post is a “deep dive” on the architectural decisions, and operational concerns, and simple mechanics of triggering a Lambda from an S3 upload.