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

History Over the last few years AWS has branched out into building their own ARM based processor named Graviton and also to providing instances powered by other x86_64/AMD64 architectures, namely AMD EPYC processors. In late 2019, they also introduced their second generation Graviton2 processor. Though, this isn’t the first time AWS has used AMD processors. If you have been around AWS for a while you may remember in about 2011/2012, you used to be able to order an m1 instance family. At the time, you might get AMD based instancess or Intel based instances. While I tried for a while to find any AWS documentation about these instances, I wasn’t able to. If you carefully search the forum you can find people discussing the instances types (again, be prepared to dig deep), but there was also a The Register article from mid-late 2012. Read more

I’ve been starting to use CDK over the last few months. It’s a really powerful way to describe your infrastructure. I’m specifically been using Python, so much of what I discuss here will be in Python where I need to reference languages. One of the things that I really liked about it, is that creating MVPs or PoCs can be really quick as there are high level constructs available out of the box. An example is the AutoScalingGroup construct. When building an AutoSacling Group in traditional CloudFormation you need to define a Launch Configuration and then reference this in your AutoScaling Group. Read more

Following on from the previous post, I needed to setup some basic alerting and dashboards. Opsgenie is being used for paging, but anything that can integrate with SNS will work well. I’ll walk through here how to create alerts in CloudWatch from the metrics, and a basic dashboard using CloudFormation. I have done a quick bit of maths and if you are using this approach, it will cost about US$6.00 per instance. If you have a lot of instances, you may want to consider what that means for you. Read more