There are a few tricks I’ve learnt recently that I thought I would share with you, as I’ve found them really useful. Constructs Constructs are objects that can contain a set of other objects to define a standard set of components. You can use constructs inside of constructs or you can user lower level Cfn primitives. You can find the AWS Documentation here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cdk/latest/guide/constructs.html https://cdkworkshop.com/30-python/40-hit-counter.html To get started you inherit the Construct class, creating your new class. You can initiate the class with any variables you wish to pass in to make decisions on your components. Read more

I’ve been using DynamoDB recently for a few projects and ran into something that I didn’t really expect to be a problem, but there wasn’t an out-of-the-box solution. Cross Region Snapshots It seems that while you can do point-in-time recovery and create manual snapshots, there is no way to copy these snapshots to another region. There does however exist a process to restore a database from a snapshot from another region. Of course this doesn’t help when that region no longer exists (for whatever reason that maybe). Read more

This post isn’t so much about how I consolidated a lot of ALBs, but more about how I saved ~USD$3,300 a year by doing this consolidation. The particular application in question has been running on AWS for a number of years and has 3 environments, test, staging and production. The application is made up of 6 services. (no, I’m not going to call them micro). Each service is an autoscaling group and used to have an ELB attached. Read more

Connect is a really interesting product with some interesting use cases. I had one come up recently about how to provide an escalated paging service. We needed to restrict access to only Australian mobiles and wanted to also validate that the mobile user was at least some what real. Finally we send a page via Opsgenie. - If you wish to use an alternative service, update the code to your provider. Read more

Following on from my last post using Athena to query WAF logs, I decided to take this a big further and look at what I can do with QuickSight to get some insights. Directly quoted from the Amazon QuickSight home page: Amazon QuickSight is a scalable, serverless, embeddable, machine learning-powered business intelligence (BI) service built for the cloud. QuickSight lets you easily create and publish interactive BI dashboards that include Machine Learning-powered insights. QuickSight dashboards can be accessed from any device, and seamlessly embedded into your applications, portals, and websites. Read more