At some point in your career, you will find that manually configuring infrastructure is both a risky endeavor and a time-consuming one. The aim for anyone facing this problem is automation — that is, being able to consistently reproduce infrastructure in different environments. Terraform is a tool that can alleviate both of those problems since it automates the management of infrastructure. …

Amazon SQS is a message-queuing system that allows you to write distributed applications by exposing a message pipeline that can be processed in the background by workers. If you are in the need of a tool to facilitate distributed applications, event-driven architecture or event processing then SQS may be a solid choice to add to your tech arsenal. Compared to other popular message queues, SQS does not have up-front costs and instead you pay for what you use. This makes experimenting with SQS a compelling value-add service for your application.

There are 3 main components to consider when working with…

If you haven’t gotten your feet wet with serverless and are itching to see what the fuss it all about then there are many small steps you can take to begin using a variety of services. Below are a list of ways to add serverless components to your existing applications without diving off the deep end.

1. Video encoding

If you have any custom video encoding features in your application then you probably have a rather elaborate setup for making sure the encoding processes are up and running without errors. Fortunately AWS has a great video encoding service in Elastic Transcoder. With Transcoder…

Having been in the tech industry for quite some time I have worked with many different types of developers in teams both large and small. Throughout the years I have observed firsthand what makes fellow developers stand out from the pack and become people that you can look up to, and most importantly, rely on.

1. Passion

Passion for technology is a must to be a great developer as it drives you to pursue new ideas and solutions either at work or on your free time. Since the primary goal of being a developer is implementation, then the methods chosen to get…

Moving some or all of your infrastructure to a serverless stack has many benefits. A few of them include:

• No server management
• Scalability built in
• Response times/speed
• Finite segmentation of code/responsibility

While solving many problems compared to traditional server-based architectures the serverless world is not void of trade-offs. The following is a list of considerations you should weigh carefully before moving large portions of your application to a serverless architecture.

1. Infrastructure setup

It should be no surprise that managing serverless infrastructure would be something that would take some attention and care. For smaller applications or one-off tasks that aren’t mission critical, you…

Most people working in technology are familiar with the tried-and-true server setup that powers much of the internet wherein a cluster of servers are dedicated to running an application or a series of applications. When you navigate to a website, for example, your request will route to the server cluster hosting the application and eventually a single server will process your request and return a response. Prior to the cloud movement these server clusters were actually dedicated hardware machines managed either by the company itself or rented through one of the numerous data centers.

With the advancement of cloud-based computing…