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.

August 29, 2019

Intro to Nodejs

My development background started with C, before turning to Java, and that’s where it stayed. Over time, I realised this was a mistake. You’ve got programming languages that are statically typed, dynamic, compiled, interpreted, object-oriented, procedural, functional and everything in between. Each of them have advantages and disadvantages and use cases where they are most appropriate. Having knowledge of only one is like believing you can solve every problem with a hammer.

July 7, 2019

Interesting Articles

Interesting Articles This page links to interesting articles grouped by topic Serverless Yan Cui - Blog Site Chaos Engineering Norah Jones - Chaos Engineering Traps Basiri et al - Automating chaos experiments in production Daniel Bryant - How Did Things Go Right? Summary Tracing Cindy Sridharan - Distributed Tracing — we’ve been doing it wrong Observability Epsagon - Serverless Observability Workshop

July 7, 2019

Locking Down Blog Site

Securing Static Website In a previous blog, I wrote about setting up this website. It is a simple static site with a basic architecture as shown below: The teachmyselfcloud domain is registered with Route 53. This automatically creates a hosted zone, with a NS record and a start of authority SOA record. I created an alias A record that points to the CloudFront distribution, that sits in front of the S3 bucket that holds the individual objects.

June 23, 2019

AWS Organizations

AWS Organizations Terminology and Concepts Organization An organization is the entity that you create to consolidate your AWS accounts Root The root is the parent container that is automatically created when you create an organization. Currently, you can only have one root. Organizational Unit (OU) An organizational unit is a container for accounts within a root. You can create a hierarchy by creating an OU within an existing OU. You can then add AWS accounts to an OU.