August 4, 2020

Streaming data from Amazon QLDB to Elasticsearch

Background In a previous post I described how to stream data from QLDB to DynamoDB to support single-digit latency and infinitely scalable key-value enquiries. Another common use case is to support rich text search and downstream analytics such as aggregation or metrics across records. For this, I look to build on the previous post and stream data from QLDB into Amazon Elasticsearch (ES). To try this out for yourself, the code is available on GitHub - QLDB Simple Demo.

July 23, 2020

Using free tools to optimise a serverless application

Introduction I’ve recently been building out a serverless application on AWS that interacts with Amazon QLDB as a purpose-built database at the backend. In many cases, making a few simple configuration changes can have a dramatic impact on performance. This post looks at some free tools and services that you can use to help optimise your own serverless application. For demonstration purposes, I focus on QLDB but also detail a brief comparison with DynamoDB.

July 5, 2020

Real-Time Streaming for Amazon QLDB

Background In September 2019, AWS announced the general availability of QLDB, a fully managed centralised ledger database. At the heart of QLDB is its append-only journal. All requests go through the journal first, and it only contains committed transactions. This data is immutable, and creates a complete audit trail of every single change ever made - essential in a digital world that needs trust in the data, and must meet regulatory compliance.

June 27, 2020

Latest QLDB Driver updates for Nodejs

Background In a previous blog post I wrote about the significant improvements made in the Amazon QLDB driver for Nodejs. At the time it had gone to 1.0.0-rc.1, and following some more updates, it has now gone to v1.0.0. Significant Updates In this period, there were three important updates. For more details check out the release notes Session pooling functionality moved to QldbDriver In previous versions, there was both a QldbDriver and a PooledQldbDriver with strong recommendations to use the PooledQldbDriver to enable a pool of sessions maintained for you that reuse underlying connections.

June 14, 2020

React UI with login flow using AWS Amplify and Cognito

After building out some simple backend examples using Amazon QLDB, it’s now time to build out a full stack application to really bring a combination of AWS services to life and show whats possible. Luckily, to do that I’ve been joined by Chris Williams and Greg Simons and we’ve set up a GitHub repository for anyone else interested in taking part. The aim is that this will be a series of blog posts stepping through some of the process.

May 27, 2020

AWS SA Pro Exam

Taking the AWS SA Pro Exam First off, well done to anyone starting the journey to certification. Just being willing to study and take an exam puts you ahead of most others, so you should be rightly proud. For me, I like the goal of becoming certified and the structured content as a way to keep me motivated. I was fortunate enough to pass the AWS SA Pro exam a few days ago with an online proctored exam.