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First Look at Amazon Redshift Serverless

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Amazon Redshift’s launch in 2012 was one of the “wow!” moments in my experience with AWS. Here was a massively parallel database system that could be rented for 25 cents per node-hour. Here we are in 2021, and AWS has just announced Redshift Serverless, in which you pay for the compute and storage that you use, rather than a fixed monthly cost for a fixed number of nodes with a fixed amount of storage. And for a lot of use cases, I think that’s a great idea. So I spent some time kicking the tires, and this is what I learned.

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Rightsizing Data for Athena

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Amazon Athena is a service that lets you run SQL queries against structured data files stored in S3. It takes a “divide and conquer” approach, spinning up parallel query execution engines that each examine only a portion of your data. The performance of these queries, however, depends on how you consolidate and partition your data. In this post I compare query times for a moderately large dataset, looking for the “sweet spot” between number of files and individual file size.

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Building Lambdas with Poetry

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Coming from a Java background, I consider the Python development process to be a bit of a mess. The pieces are all there: a central repository for publicly-available packages, a way to install the packages you want, and several ways to run your program with only those packages. But it seems that everybody has a different way to combine those pieces. So when a colleague introduced me to Poetry, my first reaction was “oh great, another tool that solves part of my problem.” But after spending time with it, I don’t want to build Lambdas any other way.

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Three Approaches to Deploying Lambdas

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“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.

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Featured Videos

All the AWS CodeBuild You Can Stomach in 45 Minutes

In this 45 minute talk, Ken Rimple gives a quick overview of AWS CodeBuild, then dives into a few of the challenges he’s faced, from dealing with build errors properly, configuring CodeBuild to run inside of AWS, testing locally so you don’t go crazy waiting for 15 minutes each time you deploy a new build, how to properly access your build artifacts and reports, running tools like Cypress, to building and deploying Docker containers to ECS, and more.

AWS: Things I Learned the Hard Way

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a collection of nearly 200 services. They can be intimidating to the newcomer, and offer many opportunities for mistakes: some expensive, some just inconvenient. In this Lunch and Learn, our panel of AWS experts look at some of the mistakes they made, and how these could have been avoided.

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