Consider event-based solutions to deal with sudden load peaks — If you have a DynamoDB table with mostly predictable access patterns, provisioned mode is the way to go. Adequately select your min/max read capacity units (RCU) and write capacity units (WCU), turn on autoscaling, and you should be safe. See the image below for a simple example. During relatively low…

I have been known to go on the occasional rant. AWS CloudFormation validation has been known to be absolutely painful. As a BE and cloud engineer, I often have to use CloudFormation. Bring all three together, and you have a recipe for a raving blog post. …

Spoiler alert: I count at least 12 — The proliferation of cloud services in the past decade has led us to a stage where, whatever the technical challenge may be, there’s usually a panoply of different approaches which can solve it, one way or another. Granted, some will definitely be more appropriate depending on the concrete use case…

Back in November 2019, AWS released the second version of their WAF (Web Application Firewall) service. You can read all about why you should use it (or migrate to it) over version 1 in the official AWS documentation. One limitation of the new version is that, in WAF v2, Web…

An example of how a Lambda container image can help standardize service deployments — The background Ever since the inception of Lambda support for container images, I hadn’t encountered a specific need for them, and I had been wondering how much added value the acclaimed feature brought. Why not stick to the fit-for-purpose ECS?, I thought. Yes, Lambda does not support every single runtime out there…

A cautionary tale for differences between regions — A few weeks ago I was asked to come up with an estimated costing for a given AWS architecture. The intent was twofold: first validate that the minimum client specifications were met by the proposed solution; then optimise the cost as much as possible within the constraints. The intended target…

Getting started building mobile applications has never been simpler. — In the world of tech today there appear to be about a gazillion ways of doing things, and it’s easy to get lost amid all the buzzwords floating around. This situation can be particularly painful if you’re working for an organisation that has several ongoing projects, with multiple teams having…

These might just help you get a jump over some of the hurdles you may encounter using these services — First things first Some context With the rise of IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), web/cloud services are in huge fashion these days. If you’re a young Software Engineer like me, it is likely you have been or will at some point be handed down a solution design (or architect one yourself!) …

These might just help you get a jump over some of the hurdles you may encounter using these services — Second things second Continuation from Part I If you’re reading this then you know that I am gone by now. Well, you would if this was a cheesy movie. It’s not, so you’re likely to have landed first on Part I of these development tips. …