February 2, 2020

DeepRacer Event

Background Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are big news and certain to have a disruptive effect on organisations. Over the past few years, the likes of recommendation engines and voice assistants have become part of my everyday life, and its a topic I want to get closer to. The challenge was that it traditionally seemed to require a PhD and deep expertise in algorithms. However, AWS have started bringing AI and ML into the hands of developers, with the introduction of hardware devices like AWS DeepLens and AWS DeepComposer.

January 26, 2020

Creating a Table / Index in QLDB

Amazon QLDB is a fascinating new service from AWS that sits in the database category. This article looks at an automated way of creating any required tables and indexes. Getting Started The first step with QLDB is to create a ledger, which represents the database instance. From an application perspective, when you interact with QLDB, you interact with tables you have created using PartiQL (a SQL-compatible language). These tables store revisions of documents, in an Amazon ION format.

January 7, 2020

QLDB Guide

A few months ago, I was incredibly honoured to be recognised as an AWS Hero. Off the back of this, one of my goals for the coming year is to blog more and try and raise awareness of technologies I am interested in. I always find its easier to learn, when you are passionate about a subject. Over the past few years I have thrown myself into serverless. You could see from all the major cloud providers that this was the direction the industry is quickly heading in.

September 28, 2019

Testing improvements to Lambda VPC Networking

Background Yesterday, Chris Munns updated a blog post stating that the Lambda VPC networking improvements have been fully rolled out to the US East (Ohio), EU (Frankfurt), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) regions. This gave me a chance to run a simple test to see if I could notice any reduction in latency. The Setup To setup the test, I created a quick project to deploy a lambda function associated with a VPC, and one that was not.

September 22, 2019

Intro to QLDB

What is QLDB? Amazon QLDB is a fully managed ledger database that provides a transparent, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable transaction log ‎owned by a central trusted authority. QLDB is called ‘Quantum’ as in indivisible discrete changes. All the transactions are recorded to a transparent journal where each block represents a discrete state change. Overview QLDB is considered a ledger database. A ledger consists of one or more QLDB tables, and a journal, as shown below:

August 30, 2019

Serverless Top Tips

Tip 1: Packaging of aws-sdk The aws-sdk comes bundled with the Lambda execution environment, but you should not rely on this. Instead you should pack the aws-sdk in your deployment package because: the one in the Lambda execution environment is always a few months old, so probably missing patches, security updates, etc. it’ll introduce difference to what I had tested AWS can update it without notice, so far I haven’t heard of anyone running into issues in Node.