Tag: cloud

Understanding Logical IDs in CDK and CloudFormation

CDK generates Logical IDs used by the CloudFormation to track and identify resources. In this post, I'll explain what Logical IDs are, how they're generated, and why they're important. Understanding this will help you avoid unexpected resource deletions and baffling "resource already exists" errors during deployment.
January 17, 2023
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Top 12 Serverless Announcements from re:Invent 2022

re:Invent 2022, the annual AWS conference in Las Vegas, is now behind us. I did not attend in person, but that gave me time to consolidate this list of top new serverless features while everyone else is sleeping off the intense 5-day conference. And I envy them just a little.
December 6, 2022
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Decision Tree: choose the right AWS messaging service

Have you ever been stuck deciding between SQS, SNS, Kinesis Streams, and EventBridge? Struggled to pick the right one for your use case? If the answer is "yes", I've got you covered with a simple decision tree to help you make the right decision.
April 12, 2022
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Personal backup to Amazon S3 - cheap and easy

In need to backup my personal files in the cloud, I wrote a script that archives the data into the Amazon S3 bucket. After some fine-tuning and solving a bunch of edge-cases, it's limited mainly by the disk read and my internet upload speed. And it costs me only $3.70 per TiB per month.
March 9, 2022
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Headless CMS with Gatsby on AWS for $0.00 per month

Can you have a website with a CMS on AWS and not pay just for its existence? I looked at Amazon Lightsail, headless WordPress, and Webiny CMS but found none of those suitable. So I choose Prismic – a SaaS headless CMS, and Gatsby to create the site. Yes, I needed to make a pipeline to build my website after content changes. But when I did it, I got a website with CMS hosted at no cost.
October 13, 2021
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Choosing between SQS, SNS, Kinesis, and EventBridge

AWS can overwhelm with the number of services. Especially if multiple services seem to do a very similar job. Let's look at the cloud-native AWS messaging services – the SQS, SNS, Kinesis, and EventBridge. What are the differences and when to use which one?
August 5, 2021
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AWS Lambda logging best practices

Logging in AWS Lambda functions is simple. You just print the message, and it's sent to the CloudWatch Logs. And everything is fine until you get a surprisingly big bill for the CloudWatch usage, or you need to actually debug some live system. Here are my tips for logging in AWS Lambda, based on my experience with real-live, big-scale functions running on production.
March 1, 2021
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Three ways to create Amazon Athena tables

Here I show three ways to create Amazon Athena tables. More importantly, I show when to use which one (and when don't) depending on the case, with comparison and tips, and a sample data flow architecture implementation. Also, I have a short rant over redundant AWS Glue features. All in a single article. Enjoy.
January 12, 2021
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Auto-generated website environment parameters

There are multiple articles on how to host a static website or Single Page Application (SPA) on AWS. But they rarely go into the topic of setting up the environment variables for the frontend application.
November 16, 2020
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My AWS toolbox - tools, plugins and applications

Developers, like all specialists, discover and collect their favorite tools over time. Having a good, proven set of tools makes the work easier and more pleasant. We can focus on getting the job done. Sometimes eliminating minor inconveniences or improving a small element of everyday activity makes the greatest impact on the comfort of work.
October 22, 2020
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Serverless Swagger UI for API Gateway

Amazon API Gateway provides an option to export the API schema as an OpenAPI Specification. With it, we can display our REST API as an interactive website. But we do not get a public URL to that specification file which we could use as a source for an interactive page like Swagger. Instead, we can only get the file from the AWS Console, CLI, or SDK.
October 13, 2020
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