Cloud is an interesting domain — once you get familiar with the different services and controls, you can build a wide variety of applications and services! Once your resources are deployed in cloud, in absence of a hardened security posture, they can be accessed by many using public endpoints.
With great power, comes great responsibility!
Usually, production deployments go through a thorough security review to ensure that there is no miss, but what about the time when the developers are deploying resources for trial/error and testing? In my experience, most developers are so focused on getting their application right, that…
With the onset of cloud, docker is used quite abundantly. The usual flow involves developing solutions on host machine, and eventually dockerize them for production deployments. In my experience so far, I have found out that the container images should be developed such that they allow configuration for various custom use cases. If we develop a container image for a single dedicated use case, then we end up developing many container images and it adds a huge management overhead. …
Recently I had to mount an EBS volume to my linux EC2 instance. Though AWS has a very detailed user guide, there were points where I got confused, and it did not always work. Hence, I wanted to write this small blog with all the steps and the output to use as reference for myself, and for others too. Hope you find it useful!
Firstly, stop the EC2 instance, and then in the Volumes section, select the volume and attach it to the instance (you may also choose to attach it to a running instance). …
Most people are already familiar with AWS Lambda functions. If you have a completely Serverless deployment, you can leverage the AWS SAM to manage, package, deploy and update your deployments. SAM scales very well is very easy to use! But there are many cases in which the cloud deployments are not completely serverless i.e. hybrid with EC2, ECS type resources. In such cases, SAM is helpful, but not sufficient, since to deploy other AWS resource types, you need to manage them in a CloudFormation stack. At a large scale, this can become a very complex problem to solve!
Most recent cloud deployments have multiple Lambda functions. As the number of functions keep increasing, the packaging of the code along with its dependencies, and updating the deployments becomes more and more complex! So, it has essentially become a requirement to automate this flow.
In this post, I am planning to go over a few methods that you can use to automate that task with their Pros and Cons. The supporting code files for all the contents of this post is located in my GitHub repo.
Using a Script:
The first thing that comes to mind when we talk about automation is —…
In all the different jobs that I have worked at, I have seen a variety of highly custom tools developed by teams with rich GUI for variety of different use cases. In the manufacturing domain, the Engineers want to monitor yield and bin numbers as the devices are run through production in real-time, so they can analyze the impact of test program and hardware. In the Embedded Software world, the interest is power, utilization, performance etc. In the Enterprise Software industry, the interest is to monitor the servers, deployed microservices and client applications.
In each of these scenarios, the data…
EC2 Spot is a feature in AWS that is widely popular in the community right now, because if used right way, you can get huge cost savings without compromising on the scalability and durability of your cloud deployment. There are many blogs already out there which deep dive on how to use the feature, so I will not cover that here. In this post, I will focus on summarizing and answering the most common questions users(including me!) have when they hear about Spot. …
The ELK stack is a very widely accepted platform for data analytics. To comply with latest DevOps processes and mindset, Elasticsearch.co has provided docker images to deploy the application code in matter of few seconds. You can use these images as is, or customize them to your needs. You can add startup code, init scripts, etc to customize them as you wish for your environment.
In my work experience, I have seen a lot of different ways in which people deploy these docker containers — most common being shell scripts or python scripts which wrap a bunch of docker CLI…
AWS recently released a new service App Mesh during the 2019 summit which has generated a lot of interest from developers world-wide. This service is a great example of how Amazon is highly customer-focused in delivery of products/features to the market. Besides that, there is no additional charge for using the service! :-)
With the advent of cloud, the importance of microservices has increased tremendously. In microservices architecture, large monolithic code-bases/architectures are broken down into smaller, more independent modules. Responsible for highly defined and discrete tasks, these individual modules communicate with each other using APIs. …
Just recently, AWS Lambda released a new feature in their service called the AWS Lambda Layers. Though Lambda in itself is a pretty cool service to deploy serverless applications, the layers takes it to the next level. In this post, I will explain why this is a great feature, and how its so helpful!
What is AWS Lambda Layers?
Let me give you some context here, on what is the scope of the problem which Lambda Layers is aimed at solving. Below list of examples will help you clarify:
Example-1: Say, your lambda code is dependent on a lot of…
