Quickly spin up a headless Wordpress CMS on AWS using Docker — Headless CMS is very popular at the moment. But what is a headless CMS and why should I start using one? A headless CMS is a backend that is decoupled from its frontends. The backend is where the content is created and published. …

Is a dev shop, agency, friend, or an offshore team building your product? — If you answered yes, then this article may help you. I recently spoke with a few non-technical founders who were having their products built by others. I noticed a trend, and my advice to these founders was always the same, so I decided to write it down in hopes that…

Now that AWS EKS is generally available its time to give it a try… — I’ve been using AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS) for a few years now and absolutely love Docker and container management. Rolling deployments, Microservices, CI/CD pipelines, etc… What’s not to love? Kubernetes seems to be the big winner in Container Management though… and now that AWS EKS is generally available it…

Check out this awesome Serverless Stack with built-in CI/CD and Blue-Green Deployments — I love building CloudFormation stacks, crazy I know… I also love serverless event-driven architectures, who doesn’t… I wanted to create a reusable stack that I could easily use to build web applications. The stack consists of an API, UI, and Async Tasks. This isn’t the cool part. The cool part…

Wouldn’t it be great to just check in your infrastructure and code changes and they get deployed automatically? — Back in October I posted the Services Stack. The Services Stack is a collection of CloudFormation templates, to create a microservices application on AWS. If you haven’t seen it already please go check it out. After posting the Services Stack I got a lot of great feedback, mostly all good…

A Product Hunt Hackathon Build — I recently built FunctionCI as part of the Product Hunt Global Hackathon to solve a pain point I was having with AWS Lambdas. Specifically with Continuous Integration, deployments, and audit trails. Before I dive too deep into FunctionCI let me explain what Continuous Integration and Serverless Lambda functions are. Continuous Integration Continuous…

Quickly spin up a microservices stack on AWS — What is a microservice? The microservice architectural style [1] is an approach to developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms, often an HTTP resource API. These services are built around business capabilities and independently deployable by fully automated deployment machinery…

AWS Lambda, API Gateway, S3, Event-Driven Tasks — What is serverless? Serverless architectures refer to applications that significantly depend on third-party services (knows as Backend as a Service or “BaaS”) or on custom code that’s run in ephemeral containers (Function as a Service or “FaaS”), the best known vendor host of which currently is AWS Lambda. Credit Martin Fowler What is a stack? A stack…

CIM takes the pain out of Infrastructure as Code and CloudFormation! — CIM is a simple command line utility that bootstraps your CloudFormation CRUD operations, making them easier to execute, repeatable, and less error-prone. …