tag: aws

Early this year amazon web services released the Cloud Development Kit (CDK) which is best summed up by a quote from the GitHub project. The AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) is an open-source software development framework to define cloud infrastructure in code and provision it through AWS CloudFormation. Before I go recommending this new project to anyone I most certainly need to road test it myself. This post provides a bit of background on where I work, and why I am looking into CDK, and what I love to see in the future....

Step Functions allow you to build pipelines involving one or more amazon, or external service. Some examples of this are: complex customer on boarding processes jobs which provision resources then send a welcome email billing jobs where you may need wait for payment authorisation provisioning users and setup of any resources each user may need pipeline In software engineering, a pipeline consists of a chain of processing elements (processes, threads, coroutines, functions, etc....

Background jobs form the backbone of a lot of modern applications, they are used to perform a range of asynchronous tasks, from image processing through to order processing, fulfillment and shipping. Wherever there is a need to dispatch some sort of task, then monitor or wait for it’s result. In the serverless space AWS Step Functions play a similar role to projects such as delayed job or resque in ruby, celery in python, but with the following differences:...

So the DeepRacer was released with much fanfare by Amazon Web Services (AWS) at this years Reinvent conference in Las Vegas. This combines an off the shelf radio control (RC) car chassis, with an intel based compute module which has been configured to control the throttle, steering of the car. DeepRacer is powered by Robot Operating System (ROS) as a framework which is used for the internal control systems making it a very interesting device for anyone getting started in robotics....

As a user of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in large organisations I am always mindful of providing a mechanism to enable single sign on (SSO) to simplify the login process for users, enable strict controls for the organisation, and simplify on/off boarding for operations staff. As an advocate for open source I was happy find Keycloak, which is developed by Redhat and is now an option for organisations looking for an open solution to identity federation with AWS....

Over the last few months I have been working on a project which uses DynamoDB almost exclusively for persistence, this has been a big challenge for everyone on the team. As a developer, most of us are comfortable using a Relational database management system (RDBMS) systems, so the move to a primitive key value store has been fun, but we have learnt a lot. To try and capture some of these learnings I have written this article, hopefully it will help those who embark on a similar journey....